Our Iceland Honeymoon: A Week of Waterfalls, Weather Gambles, and Way Too Much Expensive Fish

Me and my wife got married and decided to treat ourselves to a proper honeymoon: somewhere a bit more expensive than we’d normally go. We landed on Iceland, first week of June, and it turned out to be one of the best trips we’ve done. Here’s everything we learned, loved, and would do differently.

Why Iceland, and why June

Iceland does completely different things depending on the season. Go in winter and it’s all about the northern lights, but with barely any daylight. We wanted hiking, walking, and nature, so summer was the obvious call. We flew out on the first Sunday of June and back the following Sunday, from Luton to Reykjavik with easyJet. It’s only a once-a-week route in summer, so we didn’t have much choice on timing.

Even going as early as we did, some hiking trails were still shut because it wasn’t quite late enough in the season for them to open. Worth knowing if you’re planning a similar trip.

Reykjavik: nice, but not worth the trip on its own

We started in Reykjavik with a hotel that included breakfast. It was good, but pricey, like everything else in Iceland. The city itself is small and cozy, and we enjoyed wandering round, but honestly, it didn’t feel like a good enough reason to fly all the way out there. If you’re going to Iceland, go for the nature, not the capital.

One of the strangest things to adjust to: it never actually gets dark in June. The sun sets somewhere between 11pm and 3am, but it just stays light the whole time, more like permanently overcast than actual night.

We did visit the Sky Lagoon in Reykjavik (around £100 each), which was a great way to recover after an early flight and very little sleep. It had multiple rooms, each with a different sensory experience, and was genuinely relaxing.

The food situation

Food in Iceland is expensive across the board, including supermarkets, so we were careful about where we ate out.

A fish and chips place in Reykjavik with loads of good Google reviews turned out to be a letdown. A seafood soup starter and a fish and chips main came to about £35–40, and honestly the fish wasn’t fresh and the portion was stingy. The soup was fine but overpriced for what it was.
Black Pizza in Vík: this one delivered. Still pricey for pizza, but the black crust made it feel like an actual experience, and it tasted great.
Beer was roughly £8–10 a pint generally, though a proper brewery we found in Reykjavik had a genuinely excellent beer.

Beyond that, we mostly self-catered from supermarkets: sandwiches, microwave meals (still £6–7 each, but decent), some curries, fish about three times, soft drinks, coffee. Vegetables were surprisingly expensive, but sweets, especially the Icelandic ones, were cheap. Fun fact: alcohol is only sold at dedicated “drink supermarkets” with odd, limited opening hours, so plan around that if you want beers for the Airbnb.

I love treating supermarkets abroad like little museums, and Icelandic ones didn’t disappoint: a completely different range to what we’re used to. We tried rye bread (a bit too sweet for actual bread, but a fun traditional thing to try) and some excellent fish salads (salmon, tuna, prawn) that we kept going back for.

The road trip: day by day

We rented our car from Blue, a well-reviewed local company. We didn’t bother with a 4x4 since we had enough planned without needing one, though it would have opened up a couple of extra glacier-adjacent routes.

Day 1 (Reykjavik → Vík): About a two-hour drive with several stops. We made the mistake of stopping at a random touristy spot that wasn’t on our itinerary: a small hike and waterfall that wasn’t really worth it. Lesson: our itinerary was carefully planned, and the one time we deviated from it, we regretted it slightly. Trust the plan.

From there we hit the geysers, genuinely fascinating, with one erupting roughly every five minutes, plus a short walk up to a viewpoint and a café for lunch. Parking cost around £5 pretty much everywhere, which adds up. Next was the Kerið crater, a red volcanic bowl you can walk the rim of, with a small blue-green lake inside. Really striking. Then a wide waterfall, and finally a three-waterfall hike (about 7km, flat, easy-going) ending at a smaller but stunning blue-tinted waterfall.

Day 2 (Vík area): More waterfalls in the morning, then a big decision point: we set off up Skógafoss hoping to do the full ~20km hike (the Fimmvörðuháls trail, famous for its string of waterfalls along the Skógá river), but it turned out the trail was still closed higher up (too early in the season) and the shuttle bus back only runs twice a day anyway. We went partway up in patchy fog. We could still see plenty of waterfalls and a snow patch, and turned back as the fog started clearing. On the way down we caught the puffin viewpoint and got lucky, seeing around 20 puffins where most people are happy with one or two.

That evening we booked a glacier walk for the next day through an agency inside the pizza place (which also got us a 10% pizza discount).

Day 3 (Glacier walk + Baby Yoda cave): The glacier walk started from a different point than we expected, so we arrived 15 minutes late. It worked in our favour though, as we ended up with a private tour. Crampons and full gear were genuinely necessary; there are no barriers up there, people wander around in normal shoes, and our guide (a Polish ice-climbing enthusiast) mentioned only one fatality in 20 years, which honestly surprised us given how casual the safety setup is. About £100 each, and worth every penny.

Our guide recommended a walk we’d vaguely had on our list: the Baby Yoda cave walk (officially Gígjagjá, on the Hjörleifshöfði headland), named that because the cave opening looks exactly like Baby Yoda’s ears. This turned out to be one of my favourite things on the entire trip. A roughly two-hour loop up a modest hill, sea on one side, black beaches and glacier views on the other, and we had it almost entirely to ourselves at 7pm (still broad daylight, of course).

Day 4 (Skógafoss, take two and three): We drove further east, chasing better weather. Stopped at a small but excellent black beach with a rock arch and a viewpoint over the sea, this was Dyrhólaey, rushed because the light was fading. That evening we tried Skógafoss again. Conditions were awful; we couldn’t even see the cliff. So we gave up and went back the next morning instead, when the weather cleared enough for a genuinely good hike with proper glacier views.

Along the way we also stumbled onto Fjaðrárgljúfur canyon (short, ~2km walk, really photogenic, the one from Justin Bieber’s “I’ll Show You” video) and, on a local’s recommendation, a longer hike near it: about 7km, with more elevation than expected. The weather here was incredible even though it had been foggy and wet just half an hour away at Skógafoss. This turned out to be the best hike of the whole trip: stunning canyon views, a waterfall, and glimpses of the glacier and two glacier lagoons in the distance.

Day 5 (East as far as we could go): With rain forecast and not much else on the agenda, we just kept driving east: about two hours further than planned, past lava fields and moss-covered landscapes, until we hit a mountain viewpoint that a local had tipped us off about. We got lucky with a brief clear window before the fog rolled back in. Nearby were black sand dunes that were honestly one of the most surreal things we saw all trip. Completely empty, pitch black, otherworldly. We also passed a Viking village film set at Stokksnes, beneath the dramatic Vestrahorn mountain (no longer used, but left standing) and spotted reindeer.

Day 6 (Glacier Lagoon and the journey back): We stopped briefly at Diamond Beach on the way. It was cold and windy, but worth the half hour to see the ice chunks scattered on black sand. The next morning we finally made it to Jökulsárlón, the big glacier lagoon (we’d also passed its smaller, quieter neighbour Fjallsárlón on the way), having got lucky with weather again after missing our original slot. Seals swam right up close to huge icebergs. Genuinely one of the highlights, and worth the roughly £100 each.

Day 7 (Back to Reykjavik): We took the coastal route back rather than retracing the ring road, stopping twice for picnic-with-a-view breaks, then went straight to the Blue Lagoon for a few hours before flying home the next morning. We skipped going back into Reykjavik itself. By that point we were sure it wasn’t worth the detour.

What I wish I’d known beforehand

The weather changes constantly, sometimes drastically within half an hour’s drive. Good decision-making around weather made or broke each day. We got lucky more often than not, and I think if we’d made worse calls we’d have missed half the highlights.
Reykjavik isn’t worth going out of your way for. Nice to see once, but the real trip is the nature outside the city.
It never gets properly dark in June, mentally prepare for that.
Hiking boots: I only brought trail running shoes and got away fine; my wife brought proper boots. Boots would have helped occasionally but weren’t essential in summer. Still, I’d bring them if I did it again.
Trust your itinerary. The one unplanned stop we made wasn’t worth it; meanwhile the two hikes that weren’t originally on the plan (the canyon walk and the Baby Yoda cave walk) ended up being our favourites of the whole trip.
Food is genuinely expensive everywhere, restaurants and supermarkets alike. Budget for it, and don’t expect a good Google rating to guarantee a good meal.
A 4x4 isn’t essential in early summer if you’re not planning to drive right up to the glaciers, but it would open up a few extra routes.

Biggest regret

Honestly, probably that first restaurant in Reykjavik. Not because it was catastrophic, but because it was mediocre food at a price that made the mediocrity sting a lot more. Everything else, even the failed attempts (looking at you, foggy Skógafoss), ended up being part of a trip we wouldn’t change.