Iceland's Ring Road in 10 days — To Make Much of Time

A view of Seyðisfjörður from along the ridge.

UPDATED: 1/16/2023

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Iceland has become a bit of a tourist hot spot since the 2010 volcanic eruption of Eyjafjallajökull disrupted airline travel to Europe and turned the world’s eyes to the small island nation. Not willing to pass up the rare attention, Iceland decided to make the most of the moment and become a new vacation destination with success beyond what they likely imagined. From 2010 to 2015, Iceland experienced an annual 20% year over year increase in tourism.

For a country that has struggled economically in the recent past, this tourism boom has made a large impact (yes, with both upsides and downsides) on the economy. Add to that the fact that Iceland has made a name for itself in environmental circles with nearly 100% of its electricity being renewable (about three quarters from hydropower, the remaining quarter from geothermal sources). The cheap energy has also made it a powerhouse for server farms. Iceland is also known for its high literacy rate, which is about 99%, and is currently rated the third most literate nation in the world (the top 5 are all Nordic countries).

Iceland is a sparsely populated country. The size of Iceland is most comparable to the US state of Kentucky. Its total population is a mere 338,000 people (as of 2017), as compared to Kentucky’s population of 4.45 million! With about two thirds of Icelanders living in/near Reykjavik, the second largest urban area is Akureyri, which has about 18,000 people. It is hard to get your head around that. For comparison, the small, rural county south of where we live, in a less-populated part of Virginia, has about 16,000 people.

So, what made us want to plan a trip to Iceland? For one thing, the varied natural environment and geology - the astonishingly numerous and varied waterfalls, the geothermal pools, the mountains that change from craggy outcrops to verdant green as you pass through parts of the country, the glaciers. For another, the convenience of the “Ring Road” provides an easy-to-follow route around these landscapes. While we knew several acquaintances who had visited and all loved Iceland, none traveled further than a day trip from the capital of Reykjavik. If you have the time for the Ring Road, we would highly recommend that route to see a large portion of an amazing country.

A seal taking a nap at Jökulsárlón glacial lagoon.

Planning the trip was in some ways easy in that we already knew we wanted to travel the Ring Road and our research said that was doable in 10 days and could be done faster, though we would recommend 10-11 days at a minimum ourselves. The main challenge was deciding what stopping points made sense along the way with enough local items of interest where we could stay most places for a few nights and then balancing that with the driving distances. To top it off, the recent surge in tourism means that Iceland does not have a strongly established infrastructure to support the masses. Outside of Reykjavik, hotels are nearly non-existent. We elected to stay in Airbnb. We booked the trip in September for the following late June/early July and found that a lot of places were already booked and so had to shift our itinerary a bit as we found good accommodation options. The other challenge in planning the trip was dealing with the very long Icelandic place names and the additional Icelandic alphabet characters that were unfamiliar.

Speaking of the language, Icelandic is the main language but the country has high English language abilities. Particularly in cities or shops, we never had any trouble communicating in English, and most Icelandic children learn English in school starting at an early age. We did find a variable level of English fluency but never to the extent that it made communication difficult. That said, I highly recommend spending a little time familiarizing yourself with the Icelandic language - particularly some of its pronunciation patterns and the different letters in their alphabet. The video we found most helpful was by Dr. Jackson Crawford, a professor of Nordic Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. This 28:15 video called Basic Pronunciation of Modern Icelandic was our main source of pre-trip language introduction. We found using this to then try pronouncing certain location names (and then googling to confirm our pronunciation) was exactly what we were looking for.

What route did we take? Due to a change in the IcelandAir flight, instead of arriving in the evening, our flight got bumped to the following morning with a 6:30am (local) arrival, which cut our plans from two nights to one night in Reykjavik. Even so, we were able to cram a lot in to the one day given the size and walk-ability of Reykjavik. While far more details of our travels follow in the additional blogs, as an overview, our main stops for overnights were: Reykjavik for one night, Hvolsvöllur for two nights with a day trip to the small, volcanic island of Heimaey , 2 nights in Seyðisfjörður , 3 nights in Akureyri with a day trip to the island of Grímsey, and a night near the airport, south of Reykjavik in the town of Vogar. Scroll to the bottom of the page for a map view of this route.

What were some of the trip highlights? We took ferries to two smaller islands off both the north and south of the country, hiked the gravely side of a volcano, marveled at multiple waterfalls (not sure any back home in Virginia will ever do much for us again!), watched puffins diving off of cliffs while we were attacked by their less adorable Arctic tern neighbors, hiked in a number of different environments, toured a turf house, visited a museum based on the early settlement and Icelandic sagas, visited a geothermal power plant, hiked among geothermal pools and bubbling mud pools, visited the rocky outcrop that is the site of the world’s first parliamentary assembly that dates to 930, and walked through the rift between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates in the only spot where this appears above water.

To read more, click through to the next blog to travel through our trip in more detail. And if you’re interested in learning more about food, accommodations, and travel tips in Iceland, check out those links!

Would we go again? Yes, we would love to visit Iceland in the winter to see the Northern Lights, though of course there is no guarantee you’ll see them, or in warmer weather to tour the western fjords and the country’s interior, which you can see in the map below.

Keep reading about our trip to Iceland here!

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