Iceland tour 2009

The 'Baptism of Fire for a Lightwave' Tour

Although we had toured in Iceland for the last 2 years will still had several places we still wanted to visit. Our plan was to visit the Snæfellsnes peninsular, þingvellir, go over the Kaldidarlur route, cycle over the Arnavatnsheiði, cycle into Askja and swim in Víti and lastly to go back to Kerlingarfjöll. We certainly managed to complete all of our wishes and we had a a wonderful time and were certainly fortunate with the weather. Iceland is such a fascinating country we are sure we will be back at some stage.

You may be wondering about the title of the tour. This is due to the tent we took with us, we decided that we needed to buy a smaller and lighter tent. We have always preferred a geodesic style tent and came across the Lightwave g2 ultra XT, it was very light, had a large vestibule which we needed and was designed for wilderness 4 season camping. We decide it ticked all the right boxes so we bought one. It stood up well to the high winds we had at Kerlingarfjöll but unfortunately the material seams stretched too much and having no tape on the seams it leaked like a sieve. We sent it back to Lightwave and this is a quote from the designer:

Iceland is a real baptism of fire for a tent – there are very few places on earth with such consistently wet and windy conditions. (Being a New Zealander, I have encountered weeks of non-stop rain where maintaining even a manageable level of dampness was considered comfortable, and this was no fault of the tent – when it is really wet, and endlessly so, one must bear in mind that tents are ultimately only temporary shelters).

I will give Lightwave their due, they did give us our money back!

You can read more about our Iceland travels and the saga of the tent in our travelogue pages using the links below:

We have outlined the route that we took on the map below:

Outlined below are the statistics of our tour: