Hrannar and I decided after the incredibly busy summer we had that we would need to take some time for ourselves this fall and do something fun. We were super busy with our walking tours and the website redesign and before we knew it, the best summer of all times (weather-wise at least) had passed us by and we got slapped in the face by the first autumn storm.
Feeling the wind hit your face like it’s trying to rip it off (too graphic?) is always quite sobering. A palpable end to an era.
We didn’t want to go abroad because we spent a lot of time and money on trips abroad this year (we spent a whole month in May driving around Germany, France, Northern Spain and Italy and then I visited Stockholm in August) and we have one more Trip planned before the end of the year. So we knew we wanted to stay in Iceland and it was just a question of where to go and what to do. And where to stay because finding reasonable accommodation in some of the more popular areas of Iceland can be quite the task.
I need to put in a quick sidenote here. Every time we talk about traveling around Iceland, Hrannar mentions the 4-day trip around Iceland we did with Happy Campers a couple of years ago. He loves camping to begin with but it’s like that big yellow camper is beckoning him home and he can’t get it out of his head. He just really enjoyed that trip. I did too but not to the ring/Sauron level that Hrannar is on.
Because I’m a good wife, as I was scouring the internet in the hopes of finding the perfect getaway for us, I decided to see what it would cost us to rent a camper with Happy Campers. As I was browsing through their campers I stumbled upon something in the overview of one of the vans that I had no idea what meant: Happy Challenge Eligible. Intriguing.
What is the Happy Challenge?
My curiosity was sparked so I clicked the link to find out more. As I read more about the Happy Challenge I got more and more excited and I yelled over at Hrannar (who was sitting next to me so I definitely didn’t need to yell): “We totally have to do this!”
The Happy Challenge is actually pretty simple.
Happy Campers have listed 20 locations around Iceland that you need to visit, take a photo of yourself in and post them on social media tagging Happy Campers and using the hashtag #HappyChallengeIS.
For every place you visit, you will get a 1% discount on your rental (in the form of a refund at the end of your trip) and if you visit all 20, the final location adds a whopping 31% discount to your rental.
If you’re not great with math (don’t worry, I’m not either) this means that for location 1-19 you visit you will get a 1-19% discount respectively but if you manage to visit all 20 location you will get a 50% refund of your rental. Now that’s a deal if I ever saw one.
If you manage to visit some of the places, you can decide at the end of your rental whether you get the amount refunded or whether you get a coupon for TWICE the discount on the next rental. The best bit: the discount can be transferred to others so even if you don’t use it your friends and family can.
I actually had to contact Happy Campers to confirm that this was an actual thing because it seemed too good to be true.
Of course, there’s some fine print like the fact that the discount only applies to the camper van rental and not extras and insurance. Each photo also clearly needs to show the location as proof and at least two of the photos need to include the van. There’s nothing unfair or unreasonable in the fine print, though, and it even states that if you don’t use social media you can still take part as long as you share your photos via e-mail or by leaving them a memory card which I find quite generous.
In case you’ve started up your Photoshop to figure out how to best photoshop you into those locations, I should probably also mention that all Happy Campers campervans have a GPS tracking device (for safety reasons) so you can’t fake your way out of this.
The Locations
Now here comes the tricky part. Even though all of the locations are easy to reach and you don’t need any special equipment or even a 4 x 4 to get there – they’re quite scattered around the country. In fact, they’re so scattered around that most people will probably not find the time to visit them all. In winter, in particular, some might even be hard or impossible to reach.
In all fairness, though, we’re talking about a 50% discount so it has to be a challenge. If it wasn’t a little bit difficult it would just be called the Happy Leisurely Drive and so many people would do it that Happy Campers would ultimately go bankrupt.
The I Heart Reykjavík Happy Challenge
There are two main reasons why this challenge excited me.
First of all, I was quite thrilled to share this lucky find with all of you because a lot of people who read this blog end up renting a camper for their stay in Iceland. Even if you only get to ten of these places (which is relatively easy to do if you do the full circle around the ring road) it means that you only have to take a few photos to get a 10% discount of your rental. Iceland is not the cheapest destination around so every little bit helps.
Plus that many of these places are just great recommendations for someone who has never been to Iceland and I genuinely think Happy Campers is a cool company whose values align well with my own.
The second reason was purely selfish: I just thought it would be so much fun to try to hit as many of these places as possible with Hrannar on our mini-Iceland getaway. I hadn’t even read through the whole page on Happy Camper’s website when the wheels in my head had started turning and I was halfway on the road already.
I will spare you the details, mainly because they’re kind of boring, but in short, I contacted Happy Campers, shared my ideas with them and we have a van booked in less than 2 weeks from now.
We’re actually going to do this!
Full disclosure: Happy Campers graciously offered to provide us with the car free of charge but we will pay for any extra insurance, campsites and everything else ourselves. We are not getting paid for this nor do we have any instructions about what we need to see, do and say from them. This trip was our idea, we call all the shots, and they were just happy (get it?) to help.
The possibly impossible part
You may be thinking that I must live a very boring life if the prospect of a discount or visiting 20 locations on a relatively small island gets my panties all up in a twist. You wouldn’t be totally wrong (I’m getting close to middle-aged after all) but there’s another twist to this.
You see, Hrannar and I are busy running a business so we’re don’t have unlimited time to do this. In fact, we only have seven days.
If you’ve never been to Iceland, you may not understand why that’s an issue but although Iceland may look small in the grand scheme of things – the driving distances are deceiving.
The 20 locations include places like Raufarhöfn, Krossneslaug and Látrabjarg which are somewhat off the beaten path and including all of them in one seven day trip is not as straight forward as doing a day tour around the Golden Circle.
The challenge also includes at least two hikes that will take us some time and the ferry to the Westman Islands. Because we don’t often get a chance to visit places like the East Fjords, we also decided to make things even more difficult for us and added two places of our own that we must visit.
In total, we will need to drive almost 3000 kilometers in seven days. In Iceland in October when the weather can be all over the place and the daylight has started to dwindle. We will need to pass numerous mountain passes and areas that are notorious for heavy winds. Oh, and we’ll have to keep the business running during all of this.
To say our plan is ambitious is beyond an understatement. Failure is definitely a possibility.
For the record, I don’t recommend our plan to anyone who’s never been to Iceland before. The reason this is a doable plan for us is that we’ve seen most of the popular sights on the way a million times so it doesn’t matter if we don’t have the time to stop at them along the way. We will be spending a lot of time in the car and for us, the fun part is to see if we can actually pull this off.
If you want to visit all the places in the Happy Challenge with time to see and enjoy some more of Iceland, I would say that 10 days is the minimum amount you will need to do that. 14 days would be a more comfortable trip.
Buckle up and enjoy the ride with us
A trip like this requires a lot of planning so in the next week or so, I will be sharing a post where I will go into little more details about how exactly we’re going to do this. Although our trip is a bit of a don’t try this at home moment, the post will include some good practical advice for anyone planning a camper trip around Iceland outside of the summer months.
After the trip, I will then share another post about how things went, what we learned and things we would do differently to help you avoid making the same mistakes. You know, apart from the obvious: Don’t try to drive 3000 km in 7 days!
Because we will be working during the trip (answering e-mails, helping people book their trips etc) I will not have time to live-blog our trip like I did when my sister and I went around Iceland in 10 days back in 2013.
OK, hold on a moment – that was six years ago? How did that happen?
Instead, we will be sharing the whole trip as it happens through Instastories so make sure you follow us on Instagram so you don’t miss that. It will be our very own Amazing-Race-like adventure. Minus all the disgusting things they have to eat and all.
It’s been a while since I’ve been as pumped about anything as I am about this trip right now. We’re talking sitting on the edge of my seat / can’t think about anything else kind of excitement.
I hope you will join us!
This post first appeared on I Heart ReykjavÃk - Iceland Travel, please read the originial post: here
