Eight beds, nine nights: reserve a ring road trip in Iceland out of season

What is taken out, and what takes its place

The part that goes is the base. In the house shape you unpack once and the room stays yours all week; here it is eight rooms across nine nights, and seven mornings that begin with the bag zipped shut again. The clause about coming back to the same bed goes with it. Nothing waits for you at the end of a driving day except the next town. Three parts survive untouched. The car is still yours, collected on arrival and kept the full nine days. The season is still shoulder, which on this island means the back half of September or the last fortnight of May. And it is still two of you, because a third and fourth person in a small car for 1,300 kilometres is a different proposition and would be quoted as one. One part shifts rather than breaks. Two hours from where you land becomes one: the airport is about 50 kilometres from the capital and the first bed is roughly 45 minutes from the terminal doors. The ninth night exists for a single reason. Eight legs of this loop driven in eight days leaves no morning spare for the day the wind is wrong.

Route 1, and what it is made of

Route 1 is one loop of about 1,330 kilometres, near enough 825 miles, and it has been surfaced the whole way round only for a handful of years; the last gravel stretch was in the east. Surfaced does not mean wide. For long spells it is one lane each way with no hard shoulder, a gravel edge that drops away at the white line, and enough frost damage to shake the mirrors. The limit is 90 on the open road, 80 on gravel and 50 through the towns, and 90 is also about the speed at which the road stops being pleasant. Single lane bridges remain, mostly in the southeast and east, and the rule at them is simple: whichever car is further from the bridge gives way and waits. The highest point of the loop is a moorland crossing in the northeast at roughly 650 metres, and it is the first place on the route to take snow. One tunnel on the northern arc charges a toll with no barrier to stop at; it is paid on a website within a day or two of driving through, and drivers who do not know that first hear about it when the charge is chased. Along the eastern fjords the gaps between fuel pumps run past 100 kilometres, and most pumps are unattended and want a chip card and a PIN at two in the morning as readily as at two in the afternoon.

What nine driving days actually contain

The legs are uneven. Two are long, about 270 kilometres along the south coast and about 250 up the east side, and the office puts both early, on days two and three, before anyone is tired of sitting down. The rest fall between 90 and 200 kilometres. On paper 250 kilometres at 90 is under three hours; in practice it is five, because stopping is the entire point. A waterfall thirty seconds off the tarmac. A black beach. A lagoon with ice in it. Twenty minutes at a pull in watching cloud pour over a headland. The clock binds harder than the distance. Rooms release from about three in the afternoon and want you gone by ten or eleven, so the driving day is bracketed at both ends. Daylight is the other bracket and it moves fast: through September the island sheds close to seven minutes a day, so a week opening on fourteen hours of light closes on eleven and a half. In late May the problem inverts. There is light until midnight, the temptation is to keep driving into it, and that is how people reach a farm guesthouse at half past eleven to find a key in a box and nobody awake. Most towns of any size keep a geothermal pool, many of them open from half past six in the morning and priced like a bus fare. It is the one thing on this route that a long day makes more welcome, not less.

Wind decides more of this than you do

The weather here is not mainly a question of cold. In shoulder season the coastal towns sit around 8 to 12 degrees by day and 3 to 6 at night, which is a jacket rather than an expedition. It is a question of wind. Gusts over 20 metres a second are ordinary and arrive off the ice with little warning, and the first thing any hire desk on the island will say to you is to hold the door with both hands when you open it, because a door caught by a gust bends its hinges. Two other kinds of damage belong to this road. Grit thrown up from loose margins, and windblown black sand on the southern plains, which can strip paint in the time it takes to sit out a squall. Read the hire agreement before you sign it and ask the desk directly what it holds you liable for. That conversation is yours to have with them, and this office takes no part in it. The state road authority publishes a map of the network that is recoloured through the day, and the forecast service issues wind and rain warnings region by region. A full closure of Route 1 in shoulder season is uncommon; a warning that makes one leg a bad idea is not. When that happens the day gets rearranged: you sit still, you turn round, or you cut something out. Eight held beds make that stiffer than one held bed, and the office says so in advance rather than afterwards.

Who this suits, and who it does not

It suits people who genuinely like driving and who treat the car as the room they spend most of their waking hours in, and people who are unbothered by living out of a bag on a chair. It suits anyone who wants the whole circumference rather than one quarter of it at leisure, and who would rather have the black south, the fjord east, the volcanic north and the green west in one run than pick between them. It does not suit a traveller who came to read. No afternoon here belongs to you the way an afternoon belongs to you when the room is yours until Friday. It does not suit a back that objects to four hours in a seat, or anyone who needs an hour flat on their own at two o'clock, or a party bringing a child under about six; the legs are the wrong length for all three. It does not suit people who cook, since eight kitchens mean eight shops. And it does not suit anyone who likes deciding at breakfast, because the whole chain is held in advance and the rooms outside the two largest towns are guesthouses with six or eight of them, filled months out. If several of those land badly, say so and the office will point you at a shorter shape with two or three bases, and will tell you plainly that it is not the same trip.

Where the extra $1,840 sits

From $4,180 for two sharing, against $2,340 for the house shape. The gap is $1,840 and it is not mysterious. One extra night. Eight separate reservations rather than one, most of them small guesthouses that price by the night and keep no weekly rate. A car held nine days instead of eight. And the legs themselves, which put well past a hundred litres of fuel through the tank before you are back where you started. The figure covers the nine nights, the car, and the work of ordering eight suppliers into a chain that still holds when one of them cannot take you on the night the chain needs. It does not cover getting to the country and home again, which is yours to arrange. Nor fuel, the one toll, food, or admission where admission is charged. Parking at the busier stops on the south coast is now charged as well, a few hundred kronur, taken by card at the barrier. Anything the hire desk adds to its own contract is settled with that desk and sits outside this figure entirely. Treat $4,180 as an opening number. Each of the eight suppliers issues its own confirmation, under its own name and its own terms, and nothing at all is held until those exist and you have read them.

Awkward questions about this change

Will we see the northern lights?

No, and nobody can honestly sell you that. By late September the sky is dark enough again, and on the northern arc you are a long way from town light, but it wants clear air and activity on the same night and the island supplies neither to order. Plan the nine nights as a driving trip that may include an hour standing outside in the cold looking upward. If the lights are the reason for going, this is the wrong shape and arguably the wrong month, and the office would say so before taking the request any further.

Can you arrange our flights to Iceland?

No. This office keeps well clear of air and water carriage, and holds no contract with a carrier, so getting there and home again stays entirely yours. What it does instead is work backwards from the times you already hold. Land at six in the morning and day one is a real day, with the first leg driven that afternoon. Land at half past four and the first bed goes near the airport and day one is written off. Send the times you have and the chain is cut to fit them.

Could we do this in seven nights instead of nine?

It can be reserved, and here is what it does. Two legs merge, which puts three days above 300 kilometres, and both of the merged sections fall in the east where the road is slowest anyway. The spare morning disappears, so a wind warning that would have cost you a lie in now costs you a stretch of coast instead. It is built that way for people whose leave will not stretch and it holds together. It is the same road with less slack in it, and the office says that now rather than on day five.

Do we need a four wheel drive?

Not for Route 1. The loop is surfaced the whole way and an ordinary hire car drives it in shoulder season without difficulty. Four wheel drive matters for the interior tracks, which carry an F in their number, open only in high summer, and are forbidden to ordinary cars by every hire agreement you will sign. None of them are on this route. What is worth having instead is a car with enough weight not to be shoved about by crosswind, and headlights you trust after nine in the evening in late September.

What happens if a road closes and we cannot reach that night's bed?

Telephone the guesthouse yourself first, because it is the one party that can hold the room or release it, and write to this office straight afterwards. Small guesthouses here are used to it and are mostly reasonable about a closure they can see on the same map you are looking at; what they are not reasonable about is silence. The office then moves what can still be moved further down the chain. Understand that with eight rooms held, a closure on day four can reach into days five and six, and that money for a bed you did not sleep in does not always come back.