Iceland 2025

After our pre­vi­ous trips to the far north, which we enjoyed very much, we had planned a new Nordic adven­ture: this time we want­ed to go to Ice­land for two weeks (from June 7th to June 21st, 2025) and – a first for us – we want­ed to trav­el there with a motorhome. Our long-time trav­el com­pan­ions Andrea and Har­ry had already under­tak­en such a trip two years ear­li­er. Their reports and their won­der­ful trav­el video got us hooked.

All in all, we trav­eled a good 3,300 km around Ice­land in our camper, going coun­ter­clock­wise. Here is the route we took:

We used the time until depar­ture to do inten­sive research on Ice­land and, in par­tic­u­lar, on camper life, which was com­plete­ly new ter­ri­to­ry for us.

As we got ready, our excite­ment kept grow­ing. On June 6th, we final­ly had our bags packed:

In addi­tion, we also had two cam­era back­packs and two drone bags with us.

June 7th, 2025 - Here we go!

With all this lug­gage, our daugh­ter Luise dropped us off at Frank­furt Air­port on June 7th. The Ice­land Air flight took off on time, and short­ly before 4:00 p.m. Ice­landic local time (two hours ahead of our time zone), we arrived in Iceland:

Nach der Gepäck­aus­gabe ging es weit­er zum Wohn­mo­bil-Schal­ter von Europ­car. Dort merk­ten wir dann, dass wir wohl nicht die einzi­gen waren, die Island mit dem Wohn­mo­bil erkun­den woll­ten. Die Schlange war lang, man musste Num­mern ziehen wie beim Ein­wohn­er­meldeamt bei uns. 

With all our lug­gage, we always had to shout to make room for our­selves. One lady said: I think they want to emigrate 😉.

After wait­ing for a while, an Europ­car employ­ee final­ly arrived and took us in a minibus to our motorhome, a Hob­by Opti­ma Ontour based on a Cit­roën Jumper.

How­ev­er, the motorhome already had over 90,000 km on the clock, and you could tell by look­ing at it. The door step on the camper door was already gone. When we com­plained about this dur­ing the han­dover, the rental com­pa­ny sim­ply said that this hap­pened quite often and gave us a small bench to help us get in. Some of the win­dow locks no longer worked prop­er­ly, a heat­ing vent kept falling off, and one of the gas stove knobs was loose, but all in all, every­thing worked quite well dur­ing the trip.

After pick­ing up the motorhome, we head­ed straight for the near­est super­mar­ket. It was open until 9 p.m. Tomor­row is Sun­day and also Pen­te­cost, so every­thing will be closed on Mon­day too. The super­mar­ket was a BONUS, with its trade­mark pink pig­gy 🐷. Easy to spot and right next door… a Jysk, so every­thing just like at home.

After­wards, we drove through a bar­ren vol­canic land­scape in good weath­er, first towards Grin­davík, pass­ing the Blue Lagoon until we reached the sea, then head­ing east. At the park­ing lot of the Fja­grads­f­jell vol­canic area, we just want­ed to see what there was to see (it was already 9:00 p.m. and closed). But we were already reg­is­tered by cam­eras at the entrance. And so we had to pay 1,000 Ice­landic kró­na - about 7 euros - for about 10 min­utes of “just looking.”

That was our les­son learned as Ice­land new­bies. After that, we drove to our first camp­site, Camp­site Þor­lák­shöfn. Very nice. There, we con­nect­ed the camper to the elec­tric­i­ty sup­ply and first “set­tled in” to the vehi­cle. The camper, which was a good 7 1/2 meters long, had plen­ty of stor­age space, so we were able to store every­thing with­out any problems.

Here are some inte­ri­or views:

Final­ly, my wife set about plan­ning the rest of the trip - of course using a large paper map! 😉