Planning a trip to Iceland next November

There are many threads on Iceland here. I recommend searching through them.

It’s a beautiful place, you’ll enjoy it. But if you go planning on seeing the northern lights, just know you could leave disappointed. No guarantee. Though you’ll be there where you have the best shot of seeing them.

Love Iceland and there are several threads on here with advice/reviews.

When you go will dictate what you can do. I’ve been in summer and you can get out and travel more and the sun shines all day and night. We’ve been looking at a winter trip in a few years to get the other side of Iceland. We realize it’ll be dark and cold and we won’t be able to travel as much.

I did an Iceland trip over the week of Thanksgiving in 2017. I would absolutely rent a small SUV with AWD/4WD and then drive the 1 road on the south side of Iceland. You will be able to see multiple waterfalls along with getting to Vik to see the black sand beaches.

I would only spend one day in Reykjavik and have your blue lagoon trip to be either after you land or before you depart because of its proximity to the airport.

Find different AirBnBs along the 1 in the towns, a lot of them are bed and breakfast style which was nice. Pack a ton of layers and good boots.

We did a trip in January of this year. We knew it was going to be cold, but we packed accordingly and we were fine.

Honestly, if we stayed out of the wind, it wasn't much different than the winters in Georgia. (Snow was already on the ground but it didn't snow when we were there.)

We were there for 6 days and had a blast. We hired a guide, Teitur with Iceland Unplugged and he was fantastic. He had us from airport pickup to airport drop off. I think we paid about 5k for the week and that included his services, driving, and gas.

The best part about doing this is that he would shift our daily activities around due to weather patterns, tourist patterns, and the times of day that things were the best to see.

The only thing we were disappointed with was the snowmobile on a glacier tour- and that was one that we insisted on doing.

We stayed in Reykjavik for the week and did day trips out of Reykjavik. I wish we had just landed in Reykjavik and done a "circle" so we could have seen the galcier beach and some other things that we were limited from seeing due to distance and already having a VRBO reserved.

We really had a great trip and can't wait to go back.

Private driver and guide for a whole week. We had a 7 person group so we had to have a larger than normal vehicle.