How to Circumnavigate Iceland: Lessons from Gísli Friðgeirsson’s Lap Around the Ring Road

🌧️ The moment I realized circumnavigating Iceland wasn’t about distance—it was about surrender

At 3:47 a.m., rain lashed the windshield like gravel while my rental car crawled at 22 km/h along Route 1 near Dettifoss. My GPS blinked ‘Rerouting…’ for the seventh time in two hours. I hadn’t slept in 19 hours. And yet—the raw, vibrating silence that followed the engine’s pause as I killed the ignition? That was when I understood: how to circumnavigate Iceland isn’t a question of mileage or maps—it’s about rhythm, humility, and knowing when to stop. Gísli Friðgeirsson told me this months earlier over steaming skyr in Reykjavík, but I needed the fog, the flat tire near Mývatn, and the kindness of strangers in a gas station bathroom with no heat to believe him. This is how I learned—slowly, wetly, and honestly—what it really takes to complete a full Ring Road loop.

The setup: Why I chose the Ring Road—and why I almost didn’t go

I booked the trip in late February, aiming for a 12-day self-drive circumnavigation of Iceland. Not for the ‘Instagram shot’. Not because someone said it was ‘life-changing’. I went because I’d spent five years editing budget travel guides and had never once driven the entire Iceland Ring Road—a 1,332-kilometer loop connecting nearly every inhabited coastal region. I wanted to test what worked off-season: Could a solo traveler on a €1,200 budget realistically drive the full circuit in shoulder season? Was public transport viable? What happens when Google Maps says ‘3h 22m’ and reality delivers 9 hours of whiteout and detours?

I flew into Keflavík on March 3rd—a date chosen deliberately. Not peak summer (when 70% of rental cars are booked three months out), not deep winter (when F-roads close and ferries suspend). March straddles the line: daylight stretches to 11 hours, snowpack remains stable in highlands, and tourist crowds haven’t arrived. My gear list was lean: thermal base layers, waterproof shell, portable battery pack, paper map (yes, physical—🗺️), and a laminated copy of the Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration’s Winter Driving Guidelines1.

But even with preparation, the first 48 hours unsettled me. At the Hertz counter in Keflavík, the agent slid a yellow envelope across the counter. Inside: a handwritten note in English. ‘Check tire pressure daily. Do NOT drive on snow-covered F-roads. If wind > 20 m/s, park. —Sveinn, Fleet Manager.’ No smile. No small talk. Just gravity.

The turning point: When the road disappeared—and so did my plan

Day 3. Eastfjords. I’d just left Egilsstaðir after refueling—only to watch the asphalt dissolve into a milky haze 200 meters ahead. Visibility dropped to 30 meters. A sign flickered: Vindur: 24 m/s. I pulled over at a roadside pullout beside a frozen waterfall, engine idling, radio silent except for static and a clipped Icelandic weather bulletin: ‘…vegurinn ekki á reynslu í þessum veðurforsögn…’ (‘The road is not tested in this weather forecast.’)

That phrase—ekki á reynslu—stuck. It meant authorities hadn’t assessed road conditions. Not ‘closed’, not ‘open’: unverified. I opened the Road.is app. The map showed green for Route 1—but a tiny red exclamation mark hovered over the stretch between Breiðdalsvík and Djúpivogur. Tapping it revealed only: ‘Stuðlun í vörum’ (‘Cargo delay’). Later, I learned this referred to a freight truck jackknifed sideways across both lanes, blocking all traffic for six hours.

I sat there for 87 minutes, watching snow accumulate on the hood. My meticulously color-coded Google Sheet—‘Day-by-Day Ring Road Timeline’—felt absurd. I’d scheduled 240 km for that leg. Instead, I drove 47 km, stopped 3 times to check tire tread, and spent 90 minutes helping an elderly couple from Germany dig their SUV out of a soft shoulder. Their gratitude was warm, immediate—and completely unconnected to my itinerary.

The discovery: Gísli Friðgeirsson and the logic of slowness

I met Gísli on Day 6, in the steamy back room of Kaffi Vinyl in Seyðisfjörður. He wasn’t hard to spot: wool cap, ink-stained fingers, a battered Moleskine open to a sketch of Svartifoss’s basalt columns. We’d exchanged emails after I read his essay ‘The Ring Road Is Not a Race’ in Iceland Review2. He’d completed 14 full circumnavigations—by bike, bus, foot, and hitchhike—between 2008 and 2023.

‘You’re trying to do the Ring Road,’ he said, stirring honey into his ☕ brunvín coffee. ‘But the Ring Road does you. Especially in March.’

He didn’t offer tips. He offered framing:

• ‘Route 1 isn’t one road. It’s 17 micro-roads—each with its own wind speed tolerance, gravel depth, and bridge clearance. Treat them individually.’
• ‘“Circumnavigating Iceland” sounds like geography. It’s actually hydrology. You’re following glacial runoff—so your route is dictated by where meltwater pools, freezes, or floods.’
• ‘Don’t optimize for distance. Optimize for drivable hours: 7 a.m.–1 p.m. and 3 p.m.–7 p.m. are your windows. Everything else is recovery or contingency.’

He showed me his field notes: a grid comparing ferry crossings (not all operate year-round), tunnel tolls (free since 2022 3), and which gas stations accept foreign cards (hint: N1 and Olís do; many smaller co-ops don’t).

Later that afternoon, walking the boardwalk at Fáskrúðsfjörður, Gísli pointed to a rusted French naval plaque embedded in volcanic rock. ‘They built this hospital in 1905,’ he said. ‘Took them 11 years to finish the road connecting it to the coast. Eleven years. We think we’re fast because we have GPS. But speed without context is just noise.’

The journey continues: Adjusting the compass—not the route

I abandoned the spreadsheet the next morning.

Instead, I adopted Gísli’s ‘Three-Point Check’ before every leg:

1. Wind & visibility: Checked Road.is and vedur.is (Icelandic Met Office) twice daily, cross-referencing with local webcams (many towns host live feeds—search ‘[town name] vefspegill’).
2. Fuel buffer: Never let the tank drop below ¼ full. In the Eastfjords, stations may be 180+ km apart. Diesel is more widely available than petrol; confirm pump type before arrival.
3. Human anchor: Spoke to at least one local per stop—not for directions, but to ask: ‘What’s moving right now?’ (e.g., ‘Is the river crossing near Höfn passable today?’ ‘Any new ice on the Skálanes trail?’)

This changed everything. Near Vatnajökull, I skipped Jökulsárlón’s crowded parking lot and followed a farmer’s suggestion to a gravel track leading to a frozen lagoon I’d never seen photographed. Ice shards glittered like shattered glass under low sun (🌅). No tour buses. No commentary. Just wind, crunch, and the slow groan of glacier calving two kilometers away—thoom, then silence.

On Day 9, I missed my planned stop in Hvolsvöllur due to fog and ended up in Hella instead—a town of 800 people. At the local pool (♨️), an attendant named Ragnhildur handed me a towel and said, ‘You look tired. The hot tub faces north. Best place to see auroras if the sky clears.’ She was right. At 10:23 p.m., the sky tore open—not in dramatic ribbons, but in faint, pulsing arcs of green. I watched, wrapped in steam, while a teenager practiced guitar on the pool deck. No app notified me. No tour promised it. It simply happened—because I’d stopped where the road allowed, not where the plan demanded.

Reflection: What circumnavigating Iceland taught me about travel—and myself

I used to think resilience meant pushing through. Iceland taught me it means pausing long enough to hear what the landscape is saying.

Circumnavigating Iceland reshaped my understanding of ‘control’. I couldn’t control the wind off the North Atlantic. I couldn’t control the thaw rate of Skeiðarárjökull’s outwash plain. But I could control whether I checked the webcam at Kirkjubæjarklaustur before descending the pass. I could choose to ask Ragnhildur about auroras instead of scrolling my phone. I could decide—without guilt—that skipping Seljalandsfoss’s famous walk-behind cascade (due to black ice) didn’t negate the trip. It honored it.

There’s a quiet discipline in traveling slowly in a place that moves on its own terms. Gísli put it plainly: ‘If you leave Iceland thinking you “conquered” the Ring Road, you didn’t listen. You listened to your checklist—not the land.’

I returned to Reykjavík on Day 12 with 1,318 km logged—not 1,332. I missed the final 14 km of Route 1’s western segment because a landslide near Borgarnes closed the road for 36 hours. Instead of fighting it, I took the ferry from Stykkishólmur to Brjánslækur—a 2.5-hour crossing where I watched puffins dive alongside the hull (📸). That detour wasn’t a compromise. It was the trip’s most coherent moment: movement defined not by pavement, but by water, wind, and willingness.

Practical takeaways: What works—when, where, and why

None of this is theoretical. Every insight came from doing—and undoing—the route. Here’s what held up:

Crucially: fuel cost varied 18% between regions. Diesel averaged €1.98/L near Reykjavík but €2.34/L in the Westfjords. Always compare before filling up—even a 10-liter difference adds €3.50.

Conclusion: The Ring Road doesn’t end where it begins

I thought circumnavigating Iceland would end at the Keflavík airport departure gate—with a stamped passport and a sense of completion. Instead, it ended quietly, three days later, in my apartment in Berlin. I was boiling water for tea when I caught my reflection in the dark window. For the first time in months, I wasn’t mentally recalculating distances or checking ferry timetables. I was just present—watching steam rise, listening to the kettle hum.

The Ring Road doesn’t encircle Iceland. It encircles attention. Every kilometer forced me to narrow my focus: to the texture of frost on a fence post, the pitch of wind through a lava tube, the exact shade of blue in glacial silt. Gísli was right—not about the roads, but about the recalibration. You don’t return from circumnavigating Iceland with a checklist cleared. You return with a slower pulse, a higher tolerance for ambiguity, and the quiet certainty that some journeys aren’t measured in kilometers—but in how deeply you remember the cold air on your face at 4 a.m., waiting for the road to reappear.