On March 30, 2018, my friends and I were enjoying our evening at Sæmundur í Sparifötunum, a really cool gastro pub we’d uncovered with some help from Google Maps. We had just wrapped up our trip around Ring Road (also known as Route 1) in Iceland, and we were preparing to spend our last couple nights in Reykjavík. Considering the amount of rice cakes and peanut butter I’d eaten over the last week as we circled the country, dinner and drinks never tasted so good.
We finished up, closed out and headed to our campervan parked outside. Aaron, our driver, started the car and backed out. Almost immediately, there were those universally recognizable flashing lights. The police were pulling us over, and we hadn’t even left the parking lot.
My friend Liz and I were in the backseat frozen. What could we have done? Fortunately, Aaron handled it like a champ. He rolled down the window to chat with the police officer, who proceeded to hand him a breathalyzer.
As Aaron took the breathalyzer test, we were frantically overloading our portable wifi device with searches like “drunk driving Iceland” and “Iceland BAC.” Google quickly yielded results about Iceland’s strict blood alcohol limit, which at the time was 0.05%. Note: as of today, it has dropped even lower to .02%.
In the US, the federal limit to legally drive is a BAC of 0.08%… 60% higher than what Iceland allowed.
F!ck.
At that point, we were pretty sure that Aaron’s one beer at dinner was going to land us in Icelandic prison. However, the results of the breathalyzer came back okay, and the police officer waved us off. We were able to drive to our campsite and call it a night, but we were definitely shaken up over the whole situation. We hadn’t even considered that we might be “drunk driving” without even knowing it.
During most of my travels, I rely very heavily on public transportation, so this isn’t an issue; however, because of our lack of research, it very easily could have become the worst night of our lives. There are a lot of things on my to do list, but getting arrested in a foreign country isn’t one of them.
Before you drive abroad, make sure you’re aware of the drunk driving laws by country. Keep (safely) tripping, b!tches.