Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Iceland in Winter: Renting and Driving a Vehicle

We rented and drove a vehicle for the first couple of days of our trip to Iceland. This post summarizes some of our observations from renting a vehicle at Keflavik International Airport (KEF) and driving it in Iceland.

Renting Vehicle at Keflavik International Airport

When renting a vehicle at Keflavik International Airport, some of the rental companies have counters in the airport terminal itself and many of the companies require riding of a shuttle to their counters. When we arrived in Iceland just after 6 am in early January 2020, it was still very dark and there were blizzard-like conditions with blowing snow. This made it less desirable to walk out to the area to wait for the shuttle to the external car rental agencies. Dragging the suitcases on wheels across the side walk path to the spot for loading onto the airport car rental shuttle was not the most pleasant experience either. When selecting a company from which to rent a vehicle in Iceland in the winter, the location of the car rental company's counter (in the airport itself or accessed by shuttle) might be worth considering. The shuttle also means a delay in your departure of 20-30 minutes potentially as compared to renting from a company inside the terminal.

The shuttle makes several stops with different car rental companies at each stop as shown in the following image.

If the car rental company you're considering at Keflavik International Airport is on the sign shown above, it's a reminder that their counter is separate from the terminal and accessed by shuttle. The car rental companies with counters inside the terminal are Budget, Avis, Europcar, and Hertz.

We rented online in advance from Alamo via RentalCars.com, but Stop 5 is for a single counter representing Enterprise, Alamo, and National, which are all part of Enterprise Holdings (EHI Iceland).

We opted for the optional Wifi and GPS to go with our rental vehicle, but we never used the GPS. Instead, we used the Wifi and connected our smartphones and their GPS/mapping applications (such as Google Maps) via that Wifi connection. The Wifi in the car worked really well for nearly every place we drove in southwest Iceland and Jökulsárlón.

Before leaving for Iceland, I visited my local AAA Colorado store to acquire an International Driving Permit (IDP). I never needed to show it our use it in Iceland, but decided it would be nice to have.

We opted to go with the full insurance ("zero excess") on the car we rented because we were only renting for a couple of days and the blizzard conditions happening as we were checking out the car prompted us to play it safe with full insurance that included coverage for ash and sand. The car we rented was listed on the online order as "Intermediate SUV - Nissan Qashqai or similar" and what we actually received was a Hyundai Tucson (which we generally liked).

Driving in Iceland

Driving in Iceland was generally easy to do and pleasant enough when the weather was decent. We did have a few situations (including for an hour or so after picking up our rental vehicle at the airport) where the weather was not good and the driving was more stressful. The most stressful times were when large amounts of snow blew over the road and reduced visibility significantly. The worst we saw was on returning our rental car to the airport a few days into our trip when there were times on the Reykjanes Peninsula connecting Reykjavik to the airport that we could only see a few feet in front of us as dense snow flakes blew forcefully across the road. Because the drive from the airport was also a time of bad weather, it so happened that some of the worst driving we saw was on that peninsula between Reykjavik and the airport. We did have some brief weather issues (blowing snow and icy roads) between Vik and Jökulsárlón.

Drivers drive on the right side of the road, similar to the United States and most countries in the world (the exceptions including Britain, Australia, and Japan). Outside of Reykjavik, speeds seemed to fall typically into three categories: 90 km/hour (~55 mph) for more rural, 70 hm/hour (~45 mph) for really small populated areas, and 50 km/hour (~30 mph) for villages and single-lane bridges. There are numerous single-lane bridges between Vik and Jökulsárlón that require the vehicle coming later to that bridge to yield to the vehicle that arrived at the bridge first.

There can be long spans of road between petrol stations. Our rental car, like many vehicles in Iceland, ran on diesel rather than gasoline. Fortunately, every station or collection of pumps we saw had a diesel pump. These pumps were the only places in Iceland that I needed to know my pin for my credit card's chip. We filled up often because we did not always know the distance to the next pump. There were some pumps alongside the road with nothing else there (no store or person). Automobile fuel (gasoline or diesel) is, as in most of Europe, expensive with Iceland fuel costs often being over twice as expensive as we're used to in Colorado.

There are numerous roundabouts in Iceland. Often, the existence of a roundabout implies a new village or population area. It is also required in Iceland to have lights on whenever driving regardless of the light conditions outside at the time. This isn't too difficult to remember for much of the day in winter in Iceland because there are so few hours of daylight (a little over 4 hours in early January), but I did forget a couple times in those few hours until someone flashed their lights to remind me.

Driving in Iceland outside of the greater Reykjavik area reminded me a lot of driving on non-interstate highways in the western United States. The Ring Road (Road 1) in particular reminded me of driving on some of the non-interstate highways in Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado. Much of the scenery is similar, the one-lane-each-way is similar, and even the rapidly changing weather with potentially strong wind gusts are common among all of these drives in the winter.

Outside of the cities along I-80 in Wyoming (such as Laramie, Rawlins, and Rock Springs), there are gates that can be used to close sections of I-80 in particularly nasty weather. Iceland has gates similar to these that are used to close down sections of the roads during particularly inclement weather. Some people ignore these and this type of thing happens.

Three particularly useful web sites when driving in Iceland are Iceland Met Office's Weather page (https://en.vedur.is/), the Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration's Road Conditions page (http://www.road.is/), and SafeTravel.is. Iceland's emergency phone number (equivalent of 9-1-1 / 911 in the United States) is 1-1-2 (112). Other important telephone numbers when in Iceland are collected in "Important Phone Numbers." We also had the 112 Iceland application installed on our smart phones. I also found it useful to review SafeTravel.is's Icelandic Road Signs page before driving in Iceland.

I read several useful posts regarding renting a vehicle and driving in Iceland before our trip. Here are some of them:

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