Why Iceland?

Why on earth does anyone want to travel to Iceland? It's cold, far away and only has volcanoes with unpronouncable names which cause major problems to air traffic in Europe. Frankly speaking I didn't care too much about Iceland, I could only think of Reykjavik and Eidur Gudjohnssen when I heard of this country until... Until last year, while planning our trip to Scotland (see images here: http://www.panoramio.com/user/4350353/tags/Scotland) via Google Earth my hand "slipped" once and I ended up in Iceland. I started clicking at some pictures and my jaw dropped. I always preferred north to south (climate and culture-wise), natural beauty to man-made stuff, etc. What I saw on the pictures were waterfalls, beautiful mountains, valleys and volcaninc landscapes of all kinds: nature at it's best. I thought this was something totally unnique which only exists in Iceland. It's not at the other end of the world, the country is not too big... I just gotta go there.

I quickly found out that there's a budget direct flight from Vienna, the price was OK, all that was left was to find travelmates and plan the route. Google Earth and internet provided plenty of information so the basic itinerary was done in no time. It turned out to be a round trip (just have a look at the road map of Iceland and you'll understand why) with a bunch of turn offs here and there. Soon enough I found my travelmates, well, I found one and he got further two so there were four of us and much to my delight they agreed with 99% of the plan... eternal thanks, buddies!

Based on previous experience I thought it's better to organize everything by ourselves: plane ticket, itinerary, car rental, accomodation. We ended up renting a 4x4 as that seemed to me like a must when someone wants to see Iceland. There were only a couple of months waiting and we were ready to go!