Dear Friends,

Some of your members may be interested to hear of our experience flying our tandem from Glasgow to Reykjavik with Icelandic Air.

We booked our flights on the internet and paid £17 each way to cover our 'bike' as a piece of oversize luggage. We then rode our fully loaded tandem right up to the check-in desk, yes, panniers still attached. Whilst we were expecting some arguments we were simply told to put a label on the bike and take it to the oversize luggage area. Our machine was too big to fit through the oversize X ray machine so they did a quick hand search of our panniers. We board the plane and were pleased to see our tandem being ferried across the tarmac on the back of a flat wagon. On our arrival at Keflavik we found that they had deflated our tyres, but these were quickly inflated as they had not confiscated (or found) our gas cylinders.

On our return to we repeated the process at Keflavik - presented them with the bike has we had ridden it. It was accepted without a blink and they didn't deflate the tyres. A risky strategy ~ yes, a risk of damage to the bike ~ yes, but everything worked out well and it was certainly convenient.

My comrade and I did a circum-navigation of Iceland on the ring road, we covered just under a 1,000 mile on a ride I would recommend to anyone as we shared 12 days of laughter. That said we were blessed with good weather and favourable winds, apart from one morning when the police stopped us riding because the gale was blowing cars and caravans off the road, hard as it may be to believe the wind was actually lifting sections of tarmac and causing the sea to rise up in cyclone-type spouts.

We did not have a plan other than cycle from the airport to the junction of Route 1 where we would tossed a coin: heads anti-clockwise, tails clockwise. Heads won, so anti-clockwise it was and having done route I would recommend tackling the ride in this direction, what hills there are may be steeper but there was nothing that couldn't be ridden. To have ridden clockwise we would have faced so long drags and on the southern part of the island some very long flat straights into a prevailing wind.

Two words of caution: Iceland is very,very expensive and the authorities will not allow you to stay overnight inside the buildings of Keflavik airport - inconvenient as the return flight check-in is 5.30am!!!, so we pitched our tent on the front lawn of the airport and they didn't trouble us.

Anyone wishing to have more detailed information are welcome to contact me.