We had several trips planned for 2025, but this is the one we put the most time and effort into planning.  95% of this trip was solo, with just us and a car, with no one planning anything for us besides ourselves.  Justin looked at several companies that offered do-it-yourself type tours, where they were responsible for booking the hotels, the rental car, some tours, and then they gave you a list of other things to see and do on that day.  So then he cherry-picked from that to just arrange things himself (at a substantial discount).

Then, once he had what he thought was a working itinerary, he ran it by some Iceland travel groups on the web, and they gave some helpful feedback in terms of some days being too ambitious or just downright impossible.  So he tweaked the itinerary several times, and then picked hotels for the least amount of unnecessary driving.  Then he double-checked that late check-in was possible (since we knew we might be out late on at least a couple of nights), and we swapped out 1-2 hotels where this wasn’t possible.  

After the itinerary was tentatively set, we made a Google Map with everywhere we were going to be going, and we also figured out drive times from place to place in order to get an idea of how much time we’d be in the car on a given day.  Then we made a small handful of reservations for tours, such as a whale watching tour, a glacier tunnel tour, etc.  We got a rental car through Lotus Car Rental, which had good reviews online, and they also had a Subaru.  We have a Subaru that we like at our place in Hawaii, so we thought having something familiar would be helpful.

In the weeks and months leading up to the trip, we (mostly Justin) watched a ton of YouTube videos on how to drive from X to Y, how to best do the hike to ABC, what camera settings are best for taking photos of some of the most popular sites, and so on.  Basically, we wouldn’t have much time to figure things out once we arrived, so we wanted to be all set so as to have the most efficient trip possible.

Well, today was the day to put all that planning to the test, but it started like most days at home, since our flight wasn’t until the late afternoon.  In the morning we did our usual morning exercises (we weren’t going to get much on the bus or on the plane), and then we finished packing.  Just before noon Justin saw that Tasca Las Dehesas was closed, as it was some sort of holiday.  Then it registered that we’d have holiday bus schedules, too, so we decided to take the next bus into town.  The Titsa website wasn’t working correctly, though, so we had no idea how long it would be until the next bus.

We ended up standing at the bus stop from 11:55 until 12:15, sweating profusely, as it was about the hottest day of the year so far.  There was a kid screaming - screaming - the entire time we waited.  And, when the bus finally arrived, it was totally full and hence didn’t pick any of us up.  As we walked away, towards the main station, Justin said “somebody needs to slap the shit out of that kid.”  So, the trip was off to a good start.  The wind finally started to blow as we walked into town, and after 25-30 minutes we arrived at the station.  But then, at the station we waited for close to an hour for a bus that never came.  No explanation was given for why the bus was canceled.

Thankfully we were doing okay on time, so we took the 102 bus to Santa Cruz at 13:40.  We went past the gorilla house in Orotava; we don’t see that nearly as frequently as we used to in 2021.  We lamented that 90% of our bus problems are on the handful of days where we have a flight to catch.  This wasn’t a great start to things, but in Santa Cruz we caught a 10 bus without issue, and it wasn’t so busy heading to the airport.  At TFS, no one was in line for Iceland Air, and we hoped the day was starting to turn positive.  We went into the lounge for about an hour, and tried to get our money’s worth out of it.  The lounge is right by B14, which was our gate.

The plane wasn’t too full, and we didn’t have anyone next to us.  We were surprised and happy to have a direct flight between Tenerife and Iceland, but we wondered about the demographics for such a flight.  We can’t imagine that many Icelanders want to come to Tenerife in summer, as they’ve waited all year for their summer, and why not go some other time of year when it’s colder in Iceland.  We’re also not sure how many Tinerfeños go to Iceland.  Finally, it seems very unlikely that there are many tourists visiting both Tenerife and Iceland on the same trip.  At least on this flight, the plane was full of antsy blonde Icelandic kids.  It seemed like no one had ever flown before.

There were several types of Gin & Tonic options available, and Justin tried Pure and Lindey.  The Lindey was purple, and turned pink when the tonic was added.  We had a weird kink in the flight path - instead of flying due north, we flew northeast until level with Gibraltar, and then we turned northwest for the rest of the flight.  We wondered if maybe this was to avoid the Calima that was making Tenerife so warm.  We both got a little bit of sleep the second half of the flight.

The island looked like a cookie as we came into land, with shades of brown and some occasional black.  We’d flown over Iceland many times, but obviously at a much higher elevation.  This was the first time where we could make out anything more than snowy mountains.  We landed a bit early, a little after 21:30.  There was no immigration, since Iceland is a part of the Schengen Zone (although not part of the EU).  We got our bags, and then went to the duty free store to get jerky, pringles, snickers, twix, sour gummy worms, Rum, and Vodka.  Food and drink is ridiculously expensive in Iceland, and we'd heard the best/easiest way to save some money is to load up before leaving the airport.

Now, with provisions to last us a while, we pinged Lotus Car Rental for them to come get us from the meeting area in the terminal.  They showed up maybe 10 minutes later, and picked up us and a family of six.  The woman was speaking Spanish (not Castillian) with a colleague, and we wondered where she was from.  When we got to the office, she went behind the desk and was the one who helped us out.  We found out she was from Costa Rica - quite a long way away.  They did have our Subaru Forrester, and we hoped we could use it like our Outback in Hawaii.  We took a bunch of pictures of the car so that if something got pinned on us when we returned it, we could show it was already like that.  The only thing we noticed was that a rear taillight had some broken plastic.

This was Justin’s first drive since early December 2024 in California.  The drive to Reykjavik was fairly straightforward, and not many people were out and about at 23:00.  There were quite a few roundabouts, and not many traffic lights.  It wasn’t easy to find parking near the hotel (101 Hotel), but we found a spot one street over.  Inside, our room key was waiting on the front desk, and the door entry code they sent worked, so getting to our room was much better than in Berlin in December.  We entered the room a bit before midnight.  Crystal got to sleep right away, and Justin was up until after 01:00.