Expecting the Unexpected

This time next week (give or take a few hours) we'll have just landed in Iceland and will be heading out for a morning soak in the Blue Lagoon. I'm starting to get really excited for this trip, though I'm also really unsure what to expect. I kind of feel like I'm about to take my first international trip again.

With our last few trips, we followed a similar pattern. We spent some time in the city and some time in the country. We relied on public transportation to get around and we visited 2-3 different cities or regions. We did some wine tasting. We took a cooking class. We saw a museum or two and admired nature from a comfortable distance but spent the majority of our time and money just wandering around, eating and drinking, basically spending our time as we think we would if we lived there. Despite being foreign countries with a different language, culture and customs, the landscapes we saw were familiar ones - rolling hills, vineyards, pastures, and farmlands.

I'm betting Iceland is going to be completely different.

For one, we're renting a car. It's absurdly expensive (about $300 for two days because I can't drive stick) but tours were equally as pricey and this way we'll have the freedom to explore on our own. But I'm never driven in another country before (Dan is sans license at the moment so it's all me) and just a little freaked out about it. Secondly, I don't think anything about the landscape of Iceland will be even remotely familiar. We're also not moving around much, but rather staying in the same place and the same hotel for all 6 nights.

We're concentrating the vast majority of our budget on outdoor excursions and activities. Here's how that breaks down:
Car rental plus gas for two days - $350
Dogsledding - $500
Snorkling - $250
Horseback riding - $120
Blue Lagoon - $60
Additional admission fees (museums, etc) - under $20
That's $1300 right there.

Add in $350 for 6 nights of our hotel and that brings our total to $1650, leaving $350 in the budget for eating and drinking for 6 nights, 7 days. $50 a day will not gets us far in Iceland, not when a 3 course meal with wine at any "nicer"restaurant will run $150 alone and drinks at the average bar are rumored to be around $10 each.

To stretch our dollars further, we've decided to cut back a lot on the amount of dining out and drinking that we normally do on a trip. Our hotel has a kitchen for guest use so we'll be hitting the grocery store our first day to stock up on snacks and some ingredients for easy meals we can make in the room. We're also going to buy a few bottles of wine at the airport duty free to enjoy in our room. We plan to spend $50-$60 on this, leaving us with just under $300 for dining out.

$200 of that is going to be concentrated on two splurge meals. We both really want to eat some great seafood and try some puffin (Dan's up for whale and reindeer as well) so we're willing to trade that experience for eating out more often. We also plan to eat some hot dogs (at around $3 each), grab a pizza dinner one night, and a meal of fish and chips. The rest of the budget will be put aside for drinking at the famous Friday night runtour (the massive pub crawl that happens every Friday and Saturday and last until 5am). Of course, the cost will be offset by having a few pre-drinks in our room before we head out around midnight.

Of course, when we return, we'll see how close we stayed to the budget and how this trip stacked up to others.