We have been busy doing a few things getting ready to be away for this trip, mainly trying to get caregivers scheduled for my mom, and also getting everything squared away with our house/cat sitter.
Tripwise, we have been putting some final touches on the routing, and making a list of alternate campgrounds nearby to the currently selected campgrounds just in case we have to go somewhere else last minute due to unavailability or another issue.
We have also been trying to put together some ideas for meals, and based on those meal ideas, making a shopping list of items we need to pick up, especially for the first few days.
We have a list of a few items we will bring from home based on some recommendations of other campervan travelers that we found online. We also have been using some of their meal ideas since they were based on their experience cooking those meals in a campervan.
We are also trying to put together a list of specific items to check on in the store at the campervan company, CampEasy, items that have been left there by other renters at the end of their trips. We hope to pick up several non-food items such as paper towels, foil, plastic wrap, napkins, dish soap, zip-lock bags, and laundry detergent since they are not food items that we have to worry about having been opened.
We have a list of non-perishable goods like pasta, soups, canned goods, sealed jars like pasta sauce, etc. We will use one of our favorite phone apps “My Groceries” since it is easy to add items to and we both have synchronized lists on our phones. It is also easy to put things onto a different list so we can have a separate grocery store list where we can move things to if we can’t get them at the CampEasy store.
This is just an attempt to minimize the amount of time we take to get our initial batch of supplies on the first day. We can’t really know how much we can store until we actually see the campervan, especially the sizes of the ice boxes. It appeared to have two in the pictures, but we are not sure that is true and it was difficult to grasp the size(s).
We also looked at various companies that provide whale-watching trips out of Haslevik in the north of the island. We have not yet made reservations, which are 100% refundable up until the day of the tour. We read a lot of reviews, and now we are wondering if it is even something we want to do. Many reviews talked about the lack of whale sightings and maybe between our trip to Antarctica and to Alaska, Iceland may be a whale-watching disappointment. We will spend a bit more time trying to figure that out. It did not seem like it was an issue to get onto a boat even the day of the tour, so we might just wait. If we do make reservations, we would need to make it for two different days since we are in Haslevik on two different days depending on if we go clockwise or counter-clockwise around Iceland. Maybe we will know our direction of travel before we leave based on more accurate short term weather forecasts, and buy our tickets for only one date based on that.
We did start some minimal packing, mainly pulling out and washing some of the merino wool long underwear we bought for Antarctica. We also got out our wool socks. By next week, we will have a good idea of the forecasted weather for the first few days based on 10-day forecasts we can get for some of the larger cities on the Intellicast Weather website. We will begin to put more clothes upstairs into our packing room this weekend. Most clothing items are for cooler weather, so we certainly don’t need them before we leave.
We have been monitoring seat assignments for our flights, sometimes people cancel last minute and better seats open up, but so far, that has not been the case for these flights. If anything, available free seats have been turned into “preferred” seats by Delta, and require additional payment. Our original seats on the flight from JFK to Iceland never became available again after we changed our tickets to travel from South Carolina instead of Charlotte, NC. Now, those same seats are shown as “preferred” seats and cost an additional $59 to reserve.
Speaking of airlines, we are just so thankful that all of the flight cancellations due to the Crowdstrike fiasco did not happen to us, that would be a severe disappointment for anyone to experience, especially for vacation travel. We are flying Delta, and they seem to have the most issues with their flights and are just getting things back in order. We are just glad it happened this far in advance of our travel and that there was enough time for Delta to get their flights back to normal operation before we left.
Leave a Reply