South Iceland with kids

🚗 How the week actually drives

South Iceland is one road with everything hanging off it, which is the best news you will get if you are driving it with a small passenger. We did the whole thing self-drive, our own vehicle the entire way, with one ferry crossing and a mix of campsite nights and a countryside cabin.

The drives are short. Nine of the fourteen legs we drove were thirty minutes or less, and the longest single hop of the week was an hour and fifty minutes. That is the shape to plan to: two or three stops a day, none of them far apart, and one long transfer you know about in advance.

The other thing to plan to is the weather, which changes its mind constantly. We had sun on the Golden Circle and cold, sideways rain two days later. We packed for both every single morning — raincoat, balaclava and rubber boots for the kid, and they all earned their place.

The car was the single biggest line of our whole trip. Bigger than the flights, bigger than every night of lodging put together. Getting around is the expensive part; almost everything you came to see is free.

💧 Day one: the Golden Circle, gently

We eased in rather than charging at the famous stops, and it set the tone for the week.

• Faxi (Faxafoss) — a broad, unthreatening waterfall with a stepped fish ladder beside it and a car park that puts you almost on top of it. A five-year-old can stand close to real power here without anybody getting nervous, and there is somewhere to drink a coffee while he does. Free.
• Brúarhlöð canyon, fifteen minutes on — a narrow rocky cleft in the Hvítá with a gravel rest area and picnic tables. Nobody stops here, which is exactly the point: it was the first place our kid explored rather than looked at. Free.
• Strokkur at Geysir, eleven minutes further — the geyser everyone comes for, and free to stand in the crowd and wait for. It blows every few minutes, so nobody has to be patient for long, and the sulphur smell is its own event if you are five.
• Kerið crater is the optional fourth, a red volcanic crater with a startlingly blue-green lake in the bottom, a rim path and steps down to the water. kerid.is — the entry fee is pocket change and it is one of very few Golden Circle stops that charges anything at all.

Then finish in warm water. The Secret Lagoon (Gamla Laugin) in Flúðir is twenty-three minutes from Geysir — the Blue Lagoon's older, cheaper, far less photographed cousin, Iceland's oldest swimming pool, with an old stone structure at the edge and steam drifting over the whole thing. A beer, a glass of wine, and purple pool noodles for the small floating member of the family.

🌧️ The wet day and the rule it taught us

Day two arrived cold and raining, which meant the full kid armour. We walked the boardwalks to Öxarárfoss in Þingvellir National Park, through the rift where two continental plates are pulling apart — busy even in the drizzle. The walking is free; the car parks are not, and you settle up at the machine or online. Then Þórufoss twenty minutes on, a waterfall tucked into a green canyon with a grassy path down toward the river and, when we went, nobody else on it.

And then a play park with a giant red-and-yellow inflatable slide, which is the part of the day everyone actually remembers.

That is the rule, and it ran the rest of the trip: a morning of being rained on at somewhere historic is a fair trade only if there is something that afternoon that is purely his. Not educational, not scenic — his. A bouncy slide, a digger, a boat ride. Find the indoor thing near wherever you are based and hold it in reserve for the day the weather turns, because it will.