3 weeks to go
Three weeks until the flight to Iceland. This is a bit of surprise to everyone, including me. How did this happen? I will explain.
Actually I won't. I wrote up an explanation but it sounds petty. Iceland is awesome! And I've been wanting to go around the ring road ever since we visited back in 2008, and did not manage to go around the whole ring road. Let's pretend that that's the whole story.
From left to right: I rode the Elfstedentocht two weekends ago; the start was cold and busy. Lunch break at the third or fourth town of the eleven. You got your ticket punched at each town, this person got dressed up for the occasion. Dragon statue at the midday stop. A building so unusual I stopped for a photo. The ticket at the end, all eleven towns complete.
So it's on, and it's time to get organized.
Starting with some route reconnaissance. Normally this means scratching around in Google Maps satellite imagery, and using Street View images for the occasional sections when the cycle route is on a road popular enough for a Google streetview car to take, and trying to figure if a particular side road is unnavigable or too busy to be safe.
Not this time. The Ring Road has has a professionally filmed, first person view video of a trip around the whole circuit. 24 hours long! It's so good that all future route prep has now been spoiled.
Sigur Rós - Route One [Part 1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G54tllj-SKI
Sigur Rós - Route One [Part 2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szbGc7ymFhQ
Sigur Rós - Route One [Part 3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV7YutDr5Nw
The official story is that it's for Slow TV event, a chill 24 hour event set to the music of Sigur Rós, but I've already got Sigur Rós in my playlist so I don't even need to mute it.
From left to right: buildings from this weekend’s ride. Which went out to the tulip fields. An indecisive deer crossed the path, this is it crossing back. Stopped for a coffee at the beach and got an unusually good piece of cake! The dunes. Good street art on the way back through Amsterdam. Current weather forecast/warnings for Iceland: 40m/s wind, “travelling is not advised”.
The ring road has no space for bikes for most of the route. I do not want to be out there if there's traffic regularly coming both ways; there's not enough space for two below-average drivers and me to pass simultaneously. So I'd like to go at a time before the summer season, when the roads are quiet. But not so far before the summer that ice and snow will be a problem. Which is a careful balance.
So, what are the traffic rates? Happily Iceland's traffic service has an excellent webpage (https://www.vegagerdin.is/en/the-transportation-system/the-road-system/traffic-statistics) with links to actual traffic counts! (https://www.vegagerdin.is/media/2025/05/r_cross_umferd_2024_fastir.txt) Less excellent is that I can't tell where each station is. All there is is a station number (stöð) and a description - such as 11172, "Eldhraun, akr. til Kirkjubæjarklausturs". (That one is probably near 63.738, -18.182 but I don't want to spend time making dubious guesses for 57 stations, thanks.)
But the outcome is that May traffic is quiet, Reykjavik traffic is busy. And the weather is so awful I'm probably going to wear my high-vis webbing every day.
Three weeks to go! That means compressing the usual three months of prep down into three weeks. I should go get onto it.
