Our adventure in Iceland is coming to an end, and we’re moving back to California at the end of this month. We can’t bring our Defender with us – the US makes it doggone near impossible to import a new-ish car from another country.
We debated a lot about whether to build a vacation home in Iceland, and we even went so far as to buy a lot up in Siglufjörður. If we went through with building the house, we were going to keep the Defender in storage until the house was built, and then use it as our car. Siglufjörður is up in the far north, near the Arctic Circle, and gets a hellacious amount of winter snow. The Defender would be a great vehicle. However, we eventually decided against the vacation house.
We even considered keeping the Defender in storage in Reykjavik with the goal of coming back to Iceland for an extended period in 2022, but…it’s tough to tell how 2022 will go right now, and used car values are just so high. We got really lucky with the market timing, and we were able to drive the Defender for less than what it would cost to rent a tiny hatchback.
We managed to put over 22,000 kilometers (~14,000 miles) on it in just 7 months as we roamed around the country. Here are some of my favorite memories:
We’ll absolutely miss it, and I would highly recommend the Defender for folks who need a serious off-road vehicle. The ride quality, interior materials, and build quality were all great. It suffered no mechanical issues whatsoever despite going way, way off the beaten path in some tough conditions.