mdilthey

As promised, here's some juicy tour reports from Kelley and I in Iceland! What an amazing place- I already feel like both of our lives have been impacted forever, and it's only Day 3!

Bikepacking Iceland: Max, The Cyclist

Happy Feet

Excellent report!

BigAura

Nice!

jimmyj726

Brings back great memories of when I was stationed in Iceland while in the Air Force. Great pix.

roadfix

Awesome report and pics!!

nun

Looks fantastic. A visit to Iceland can be an amazing spiritual adventure, especially if you are alone in some of the remote areas in the East. You have to be confident in your cycling ability though because of the changeable weather conditions and sparse population. Make good use of the good weather while you have it

DropBarFan

Kinda interesting in re the contrast between Iceland being an advanced country yet very-lightly populated areas. I didn't realize food stores so infrequent in the interior.

Northwestrider

Interesting , I look forward to the next phase .

jefnvk

Not just the interior, everywhere. We ended up shopping at gas stations once or twice when we did the ring road in cars. You don't realize how isolated everything in Iceland is until you've been there. Almost nothing developed in the interior, though, very inhospitable and inaccessible most of the year, tis why the worst criminals were banished to there in the Viking times.

Wonderful ride. Do you have a map of the route you covered?

alan s 

Looks like an adventure. How are the bugs?

Leebo

Shoes worked out?

nun

As long as you don't annoy the Huldufolk you'll be fine.

DropBarFan

Yeah, their population density is among world's lowest. Maybe a good retirement spot for adventurous survivalist types? Wind & geothermal energy, no pesky neighbors etc, heh.

jefnvk

I'm still between a sheep farm in Iceland and a cidre field in Normandy as a retirement home myself

Northwestrider

As an earlier post asked , I was wondering how are the mosquitoes ? Lots ?

nun

Black flies can be terrible in the East. You must bring a head net

wished

Looks amazing! Never been to Iceland at all but as a photographer it certainly in on my bucket list. I talked my wife into a transatlantic cruise when she retires in 2017. My motive was to celebrate her retirement finally but also I wanted to see some of Iceland, although only briefly in our three ports we stop in while there. My long range goal is to go back in another year or two so your posts are very valuable to me. Great photos by the way, love to see great photos instead of just snapshots. Looking forward to the "rest of the story"!

Doug64

I couldn'the find any great photos


Max, have a great ride!

mdilthey

Here's Update #2... And yes, you are right about the flies!

Bikepacking Iceland: New Friends and New Topography

Northwestrider

Well your update sure answered the question about bugs . arrgghh black flies are worse than mosquitoes by far , especially in those numbers . Glad for you that they seemed to be in a fairly limited area of your journey so far .

mdilthey

We're going to try and avoid lakes on our route moving forwards. The freshwater seems to be the factor here. Just 40km to the east of the lake, we have no problems.

Northwestrider

I thought I had seen black flies before ( Canada ) but nothing in the numbers shown . Yes avoiding lakes seems like a good plan . I look forward to more updates .

Tourist in MSN

I do not mean to hijack the Midlthey thread, but I got home yesterday from my Iceland trip.

If I had known that that I could buy Butane mix stove cartridges at Bonus stores for less than I would pay in USA for that size cartridge, I would have left the liquid fuel stove at home and just planned to use Butane mix cartridges.

The campground at Reykjavik was hugely crowded with bike tourists when I left to come home, but when I arrived there in mid June there were almost no bike tourists. It is pretty clear that mid July is the start of the busy season but when I first got there, almost nobody was there.

I met only a couple USA bike tourists at the campgrounds or on the road. Lots of Brits, some from the Netherlands, a few from Italy, Germany, Belgium, Canada, Australia, etc.

I think about 5 to 10 percent of the bike tourists I saw were trying to do it with bike packing gear, most with conventional panniers.

It is amazing how bright it is there, all 24 hours long. I could only get to sleep buy putting a towel over my head (in my tent) to block out the light. The sun sets there, but it stays so close to the horizon that it does not get dark. I brought a very tiny flashlight and never used it. I know there are tunnels there, so I brought a bike headlamp, but never found a tunnel.

A few photos attached.

I was surprised to ride past a grocery store on day eight, I had not realized that I did not need to carry as much food as I was carrying. I started with 14 days of food. But I must say that there are advantages of not having to worry too much about were the grocery stores are, I usually just added to my inventory when I happened across a store.

I used my headnet twice and a couple times used repellent. Best to avoid using a headnet when cooking, I have a few food stains on the net from forgetting that the net was in front of my mouth at taste testing time.

Tourist in MSN

I forgot to mention in my post above that the Cycling Map is extraordinarily useful. I consider it a must have map. They are free, I picked mine up at the HI City Hostel, that is adjacent to the campground where they also had them.

If anyone is going to Iceland, send me a private message, I brought home about three extra copies and can mail them out to people that will use them. It would be useful for planning your trip. My postage stamps (the forever stamps) only work in USA, so I can't mail to other countries.

I was surprised how many cyclists I met in the campgrounds that did not have a copy and were unaware of the map.

The attached photos are photos of parts of the map. You will note in the photos that roads are labeled by how busy they are and surface (gravel or paved) and campsites are shown (green slice in pie charts means camping, I did not include the color code part of the legend here for pie charts) which is also quite useful. And unusually steep sections of most roads also marked on the maps, but there were some very steep very short sections that did not make the map.

Northwestrider

I'm considering Iceland or Finland for next summers tour, I'm enjoying this tread .