Planning when you have no idea where to go

Most of our travel is self-guided: we rent a car and drive, and occasionally fly, between stops. Even for our most complex trips - the Western parks and Croatia - we figured out where to go, picked the hotels, set the itinerary. So we naturally started planning this trip the same way. We started with no more knowledge than that the airport was near Reykjavik.

Each of these places is not like the other

 

One technique we've used in the past is to look at suggested tours in various travel guides, see what interests us, and then assemble the stops we want to make based on that. We immediately ran into a problem: while Icelandic (mostly) uses the same Latin alphabet we are used to, the place names all had a strange similarity to each other. It seemed like every place had the same long multi-syllabic name. This made it very difficult to assemble a list of stops to make, as I couldn't remember which was which.

 

Second, we had no idea where anything was, nor where the accommodations were relative to each. You can't just rely on two spots being (say) 30 km apart; that could be 20 minutes or an hour, depending on the road condition and terrain.

 

I reviewed a number of trip blogs and vlogs to try and get a sense of how to approach it. Most of them appeared to be young travelers, with a very different style than us: a lot of camping and/or sleeping in the car. Not really suitable for us old folk.

Pick a card, any card

 

After a few weeks of this, we broke down and asked two travel agents to make proposals for a 12 day trip. One was a Scandinavian firm with good reviews on TripAdvisor, the other a US firm we've used before. After getting them both, we still were clueless about how they compared. We wound up selecting the Scandinavian firm based on their obvious expertise in this trip. They booked the hotels (which they selected and only showed us after we paid a deposit), arranged a car rental (a medium sized 4x4), and even transfer us from the airport to Reykjavik, out first stop.

 

Once we paid the deposit and got the hotel list, Sally started working on ensuring their choices were acceptable, the room class was appropriate, and working with our agent on any any changes required. She also specified our hotel in Reykjavik for the first two nights, which they were happy to book.

There's a Ford in our future

 

We still can't pronounce the names of many of the places we're staying and seeing. But our car will be a Ford Explorer (or equivalent). But this is the first time we've relied completely on an agent for our itinerary.

 

 

Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans