Iceland

August – September 2025

We spent a few days in Iceland on our way home from a family trip to Denmark and Sweden in 2018 and were blown away by the what we saw in just 2 1/2 days. While we saw a lot during that time, we barely scratched the surface and weren’t able to see all we wanted. We also learned that it was possible to drive around the entire country on “the ring road”, Iceland’s highway 1 that encircles the main portion of Iceland. We could only image the sights we’d see on a tour of the country with time to visit less traveled locations. Fast forward several years and I learned of a well-known hut to hut trail in Iceland from a fellow hiker while we were completing the Camino de Costa Rica last Spring. When I returned from Costa Rica and started looking for more multi-day supported hikes in other countries I looked up the Laugavegur Trail, Iceland’s most well-known hiking trail. It is 55 kilometers in length and is often hiked in 4 days and three nights. While researching that, I came across Amorak Adventures and their 12-day Hidden Trails of Iceland trip. That trip is 150 kilometers in length and promises a trek covering less popular trails in the Iceland Highlands before connecting with the last two days of the Laugavegur trail. I was intrigued. I read all that I could find out about the trip and watched a webinar by one of the two Amorak co-founders and guides. The 2024 trips were completely full, so I soon placed a deposit on a trip for the summer of 2025. Plans for a longer visit to Iceland started to take shape. After reviewing calendars and investigating Iceland weather conditions in the summer and early fall, we decided that I’d do the hike at the end of August 2025 and then Angie would meet me and we’d spend 12 days or so driving around the country.

Iceland’s weather is notoriously unpredictable, but everything we read indicated that we could expect a mix of sun, rain and wind in August and early September, and that the rain and bad weather was usually short lived with day long and multi-day periods of bad weather the exception. And unlike the height of summer where there is no real darkness, we’d have a real night and a chance to see the aurora borealis in September. I got serious about planning out our self-drive portion of the trip in early Spring of 2025 and put together a 12-day road trip that would take us all around Iceland. I used Wanderlog to keep track of our reservations and identify things to do and see along the way.

The plan was for me to arrive Iceland a few days early in order to adjust to the time, spend 12 days on the Hidden Trails hike, return to Reykjavik and meet Angie who had arrived the previous day and spend the day getting ready to leave on our road trip, and then pick up a rental car the following day and set off. The following entries generally follow that plan.