Iceland was supposed to be my reward.
I had just finished the Spain Property Buyer Toolkit, and apparently my idea of relaxing after months of spreadsheets, guides and property calculations was to fly to Iceland, rent a car, drive more than 2,400 kilometres around an island, climb volcanoes, kayak between icebergs, chase whales and chase the northern lights.
Very restful.
We had seven days.
The plan was ambitious: drive the Ring Road, add Snæfellsnes, see waterfalls, glaciers, volcanoes, whales, black beaches and — hopefully — finally see the kind of aurora that actually dances.
I had seen the northern lights before in Tromsø. They were green, beautiful and clearly visible with the naked eye.
But I wanted the ridiculous dancing version.
Iceland gave me that.
Twice.
And, as usual, it happened when I wasn’t quite expecting it.
The plan: basically, all of Iceland in one week
I don’t actually like planning.
My partner does.
He likes to know where we are sleeping, especially after we checked Vík and discovered only two places still had availability.
He also wanted to book a camper van.
I refused.
A camper van would have meant driving slowly, and we already had a lot of Iceland to cover.
So we compromised: he got some certainty, and I had to do some planning. 😬
I booked everything five days before the flight, which is about as organised as I usually get.
Hotels and three experiences were fixed.
Everything in between was deliberately loose.
That turned out to be exactly right.
Iceland is not really a country where you drive directly from A to B.
You drive twenty minutes, see something, stop.
See horses? Stop.
Steam coming out of the ground? Stop.
Interesting road you hadn’t planned to take? Take it.
Suddenly your carefully calculated two-hour drive takes four.
This was the plan: seven days, seven routes or regions. An accidental 7×7.
The south: waterfalls, black beaches and getting wet for absolutely no reason
We started with the classic Iceland postcard route.
Hveragerði gave us our first taste of the geothermal landscape before we continued to Seljalandsfoss and Skógafoss.
At Skógafoss, Iceland added a double rainbow because apparently one rainbow would have been too subtle.
From there we headed to Sólheimajökull.
We didn’t do a guided glacier hike, but we walked all the way out to the edge of the glacier itself — close enough to see where the ice begins and the landscape changes completely.
It was our first proper close-up of an Icelandic glacier.
Then came Reynisfjara and its famous black sand.
That evening was one of the three experiences I had deliberately booked: horse riding near Vík.
Icelandic horses are small, ridiculously photogenic and taken very seriously.
Mine was a 28-year-old horse called Drösul frá Ási.
That alone made him memorable.
His stable profile described him as cuddly, enthusiastic and occasionally convinced he knows better than his rider.
Accurate.
One thing worth knowing: Icelandic horse-riding tours usually have rider weight limits.
The day Iceland started feeling different
The glacier day was when Iceland stopped feeling like a collection of famous sights and started feeling special.
We stopped at Fjaðrárgljúfur, crossed the enormous Eldhraun lava fields and continued toward Skaftafell and Jökulsárlón.
I had booked kayaking on the glacier lagoon.
It became my favourite experience of the entire trip.
There is something strange about paddling between pieces of ice that have broken away from a glacier.
You are close enough to see the different shades of blue and the dirt trapped inside the ice. Everything feels enormous and completely still.
Then I had an idea.
I asked whether I could take one of the little pieces of ice.
There was some discussion.
Quite a lot of discussion, actually.
Eventually I was allowed to keep one.
So naturally, instead of taking it back to the hotel as a souvenir, I ate it.
Yes.
I ate a piece of glacier ice while kayaking.
And the water?
Slightly salty.
Iceland: where apparently even the souvenirs can become snacks.
We crossed the road to Diamond Beach afterwards.
There was one diamond.
Iceland does occasionally oversell itself.
The kayaking, though?
Absolutely worth it.
The east: the Iceland I wasn’t expecting
The East Fjords were quieter.
And I liked that.
We stopped in Djúpivogur, drove along the coast and even spotted a whale from the road.
Later, over fish and chips in Egilsstaðir, we met a French couple who had brought their own car to Iceland.
They told us they had visited around 25 times.
Twenty-five.
I liked Iceland.
I wasn’t sure I liked anywhere at 25-times level.
I admired the commitment.
Later we headed to Stuðlagil Canyon, another reminder that some of the best places require effort.
You go down.
And then, unfortunately, you have to go back up.
We ended the day at Blábjörg with a sauna and conversations with other travellers — another couple doing roughly our route and an American who had already spent five weeks hiking around Iceland.
Those random conversations became part of the trip too.
The whale dash
Whale watching was supposed to be simple.
Of course it wasn’t.
Our Húsavík tour had to be rescheduled because of the weather, suddenly turning the next day into a race from the east to make the replacement departure.
So we did what any sensible traveller would do.
We rushed across Iceland to look for an animal that may or may not appear.
Three humpbacks appeared.
Worth it.
They blew at the surface, hung around the boat and eventually went for a dive, showing off their flukes as they disappeared.
The strange part came later.
After spending the afternoon admiring whales in the ocean, whale meat appeared on a local charcuterie plate that evening.
My partner tried it.
I didn’t.
That later became an entirely separate discussion about Icelandic whaling, tourism and whether whale watching may simply be a better business than whale hunting.
That is one of the things I like about travel.
You can begin the day admiring something and end it discussing the economics of eating it.
Mývatn: Iceland turns the volume up
If the south is Iceland made for postcards, the Mývatn area is where the country starts showing off geologically.
We climbed Hverfjall and started walking around the rim.
The wind was already strong, but halfway around, Iceland apparently decided hail would improve the experience.
We abandoned the full loop.
No medal was waiting for us at the end anyway.
Then came Dimmuborgir, Grjótagjá, Hverir, Krafla, Víti and Leirhnjúkur.
Leirhnjúkur became my second-favourite place in Iceland.
Not because it is the prettiest.
It isn’t.
It feels raw.
The landscape looks unfinished, as though the Earth has been opened up and nobody has bothered putting it back together.
Steam rises from the ground. Lava fields stretch around you. The colours barely look natural.
That felt like the Iceland I had imagined before coming.
We finished the area at Goðafoss — the wide, horseshoe-shaped waterfall — before continuing north.
The north surprised me
I knew the south would be beautiful.
I expected Snæfellsnes to be beautiful.
The north was the surprise.
The coastal drive felt completely different, particularly around Siglufjörður.
I really liked Siglufjörður.
It felt lived-in rather than arranged for tourists.
We continued through Hofsós, fuelled in Blönduós and stopped at Kolugljúfur.
Near the Erik the Red area, we also stumbled into Réttir, Iceland’s traditional annual sheep roundup, where farmers bring free-roaming sheep down from the mountains.
There was sheep traffic.
By then we had driven through so many tunnels that I had stopped counting.
At one point we even found sheep lying inside one, apparently sheltering from the wind.
Very Iceland.
The northern lights: exactly what I had been waiting for
I had been checking the aurora forecast almost obsessively.
We had already seen a faint green aurora around Vík earlier in the trip.
Beautiful, but not the one I had been waiting for.
Then near Hauganes, Iceland finally delivered.
This one moved.
It danced.
It was exactly what I had hoped to see.
That is the thing about the northern lights.
You can plan the trip, check the forecast and find the darkest possible place.
Ultimately, the sky decides.
Snæfellsnes: apparently I’d been looking at the volcano all day
Our final full day took us around Snæfellsnes.
Saxhóll Crater. Djúpalónssandur. Lóndrangar. Búðir. Arnarstapi. Ytri Tunga. Snæfellsjökull.
At Djúpalónssandur I found the old lifting stones once used to test whether men were strong enough to work on fishing boats.
Obviously, I had to try.
There are four.
The smallest weighs 23 kg.
The next one, 54 kg.
Then 100 kg.
And finally 154 kg.
Historically, you needed to manage at least the 54 kg stone to qualify as an oarsman.
I managed the first one.
The 23 kg one.
So apparently I would not have made the fishing crew.
Good thing I found out several hundred years too late.
Then there was Snæfellsjökull.
Except I didn’t realise at first that the huge glacier-covered mountain I kept photographing was Snæfellsjökull.
At some point I finally asked which one it was.
Turns out I had basically been looking at it all day.
This is why the brand is called Clueless Gene.
Reykjanes: one last surprise
After Snæfellsnes, we headed south toward Reykjanes for our final night.
By this point I thought Iceland had probably shown us everything it was going to show us.
Apparently not.
We stopped at the Bridge Between Continents and then headed to Gunnuhver, where the ground was steaming and bubbling again — a suitably Icelandic way to end a week of volcanoes, lava fields and geothermal landscapes.
We had been at Gunnuhver watching the steam in the dark when the sky started performing.
Then, on the drive toward Hotel Bóli, the aurora appeared again.
We stopped.
Drove a little farther.
Stopped again.
And even after reaching the hotel, it kept dancing.
It became our third aurora night of the trip — after Vík and Hauganes — and one of the strongest.
For a trip that had started with me hoping Iceland might finally give me the ridiculous dancing northern lights, it was a pretty good way to finish.
What would I do differently?
I would slow down.
Not dramatically.
I still like road trips and I do not regret driving the Ring Road.
But seven days for the Ring Road plus Snæfellsnes is fast.
Ten days would have been better.
What I would keep is the flexibility.
Book what genuinely needs booking.
Leave room around everything else.
Weather changes.
Whales do not care about your itinerary.
You discover places you didn’t know existed.
And sometimes you simply decide to keep driving.
Would I go back?
Yes.
But not tomorrow.
We packed a huge amount into seven days, and I don’t feel the need to immediately return and repeat the Ring Road.
But I would come back for a different Iceland.
The Highlands.
For now, though, I got exactly what I came for.
A reward after finishing the Toolkit.
Although apparently my version of a reward is not particularly relaxing.
What actually happened: 7×10
We had planned 7 routes in 7 days — our accidental 7×7 Iceland road trip.
By the end, it had become 7×10: seven days, ten road routes around Iceland.
And only afterwards did I notice another completely unplanned pattern.
We drove 2,422 kilometres, covered 10 routes, explored 3 craters and 3 canyons — all in just 7 days.
Add 3 humpbacks and 3 aurora nights, and somehow we had ended up with a completely unplanned 3–3–3–3 along the way.
None of that was planned.
Neither was eating a piece of glacier ice while kayaking between icebergs.
Or discovering that I probably wouldn’t have qualified for an Icelandic fishing crew.
And maybe that is the best thing Iceland taught me.
You need enough of a plan to keep moving — accommodation, the things that genuinely need booking, and some idea of where you are going next.
But you also need enough freedom to stop.
For the horses.
For the steam coming out of the ground.
For the road you suddenly decide to take.
For the whale you spot from the car.
Or for the sky when it suddenly starts dancing.
We planned enough to get around Iceland.
The rest happened along the way.
And if you want to tackle our 7×10 Iceland road trip without spending dozens of hours figuring out how all those routes fit together, I’ve already done that part.
Not bad for a relaxing reward.