This post is a long one coming and I have it broken into 3 parts because lets be honest, Iceland is TOO good to have one post.  Plus I have 293829348290384 images that I have to share. Not to mention, a tragic accident to end the story off with!  But first, the good stuff!

We had one killer road trip planned. Literally. And only 8 days to make it happen. Whenever you research “road trip around Iceland”, most will tell you to give yourself about 10-14 days to REALLY enjoy everything and make multiple stops. Andie and I jammed 14 days worth of awesome into 8, because we are awesome! Check the map of our entire trip. I’m even so psycho that I mapped out where gas stations were along our route so we could gauge when we needed to get gas or if we could push further for a little bit. (ps- there are a lot more gas stations that what I have listed ;))

We were set to land at Keflavik around 6am, so we left the first day to explore Reykjavik. Which really turned into making a pit stop at the Blue Lagoon to show Andie the pretty milky blue waters and finding breakfast ASAP. Andie found this perfect place called The Laundromat Cafe where I had the best baby pancakes and Andie finally had some fresh coffee.

We then went to one place where I knew we could get epic views of the city, the Hallgrímskirkja church. An icon of downtown Reykjavik. I had visited this beautiful church last year but never had it in me to go inside or to the top. This time that was not the case and for only $9 USD… I recommend anyone else to do the same.  Reykjavik is beautiful from below and from above!




We then checked in to our hostel and boy oh boy. I feel bad for Andie as this was her first hostel experience and of course it was easily one of the worst hostel experiences I’ve ever had. I’ll leave it at some crazy rude older French folks who ended up being a pain in the butt and kept us up and we ended up leaving the hostel a few hours earlier than expected. This is also where Andie fried my converter with her hair dryer. Crisis was adverted though. No fires were had.

We then set off on our journey around 2:30am. A whopping 3 hours earlier than we had planned and with a jam packed day of driving ahead of us. 17 hours straight of driving actually. What can I say, ya girl likes road trips. We originally planned to sleep in the car somewhere after Kirkjufell along the Snæfellsnes peninsula. We ended up being VERY ahead of schedule so we decided to just keep trucking along until we felt tired. We ended up driving HALF of the Westfjords before we called it quits. I mean it was a LONG day. The westfjords were originally dedicated to have its very own day but, such is life.

This is what 3:30am in the morning in Iceland looks like.















As far as sight seeing goes in Iceland, you must know that its beautiful, buts its not your average beautiful. Iceland is mostly barren and most of the time you will see a whole lotta notta, Though we did count 557 waterfalls throughout our entire trip and thats not even counting the ones we didn’t see or that we missed. We ventured through the fjords and its was beautiful! I’m talking sweeping mountains and deep inlets. So gorgeous to see but also some of the sketchiest mountain dirt roads I have ever driven. Andie found an epic natural hot spring that we had our hearts set on, the Reykjafjarðarlaug pool. Roads of death I tell you! When we arrived, we had the entire place to ourselves for the most part. Another American from Philly named Kristen, hopped on in with us and we enjoyed her travel talk and suggestions on where we should head in the west fjords. She also snagged a few shots of Andie + myself too. She was cool.










After making it to the cutest town, ísafjörður, we grabbed a much needed bite to eat for dinner and drove to a neighbor fjord to find a spot to sleep for the first night in the car. Seriously an epic first day!  Wait until you see Part II though.  Iceland is seriously the best.