Road Trips - Detour

The Ring Road, Anticlockwise

Delphine Roy — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Iceland’s ring road is 1,332 kilometres and almost everybody drives it in the same direction: south first, because that is where the famous stops are and because the rental desk hands you a map with the route drawn that way.

Go the other way. The south coast is the busiest third of the road and the part that most rewards an empty car park, and if you arrive there on day eight rather than day two you get it in the second half of the afternoon, in autumn light, after every coach has turned for home.

Day three, east side, and the last car we saw for forty minutes. Photo: Suju.

Seven days, the other way round

Days one and two: north from Keflavik, Borgarnes, the long empty run to Akureyri.
Day three: Myvatn. The one place worth two nights.
Days four and five: the east fjords, which are the quietest and the least photographed part of the whole loop.
Days six and seven: the glacier lagoon, then west along the south coast into the evening.

The direction is not a detail. It decides whether the sun is in your windscreen or over your shoulder for six hours a day, for a week.

What will go wrong

Wind. Not rain — wind, which closes roads, takes car doors off their hinges and is the single most common cause of a claim on an Icelandic hire car. Check the road service site every morning, take the gravel protection, and never open a door without holding it.

The North Coast, Slowly

Delphine Roy — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The North Coast route has been a victim of its own signage. It was invented as a marketing idea, it worked far too well, and for a few summers it turned some of the emptiest roads in Britain into a queue of camper vans doing it in four days because a blog said four days was enough.

Four days is not enough. Four days is 200 kilometres a day on roads where the average speed is closer to forty, which means the whole trip is driving and the stops are photographs taken through a windscreen.

The bit between Durness and Tongue, which is worth an entire day on its own. Photo: Ekrulila.

How to use nine days

Three nights in the northwest. Assynt and Sutherland are the reason the road exists.
Two nights on the north coast proper, which is beaches, and they are extraordinary and freezing.
Two nights on the east, which is the quiet half and much underrated.
Two spare. Something will be shut, or the weather will hand you one perfect day that deserves to be used somewhere else.

Passing places are for passing and for letting people by. They are not viewpoints, and the single thing that makes locals despair is a car parked in one with nobody in it.

Fuel and food

Both are further apart than you expect. North of Ullapool, fill up whenever you are under half a tank, and assume the kitchen stops at eight. This is not a hardship; it is simply a different set of rules from the one the route is usually planned under.

Nine Passes, One Tank

Delphine Roy — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Driving in the Alps has been quietly ruined by efficiency. The motorway goes through the mountain now, the pass road above it is empty, and most people never find out the pass road is there because the satnav has no reason to mention it.

Turn the routing off and pick the passes deliberately. A good one gives you twenty minutes of hairpins, a cafe at the top that has been there ninety years, and a descent into a completely different valley with a different language at the bottom of it.

Third pass of the second day. The cloud sat at exactly this height until four. Photo: Alexey K.

The direction rule

Drive passes so the drop is on the passenger side. It sounds like superstition and it is not: on a road with no barrier and a two-metre lane, the difference between hugging a rock wall and hugging four hundred metres of air is the difference between a pleasure and an ordeal.

Start early. Coaches and cyclists both own these roads by ten.
Check opening dates. Many are shut until late May and some until June.
One tank is enough for the loop, but not for the loop plus a detour, and the top of a pass is the worst place to discover that.

Nobody remembers a tunnel. Everybody remembers the cafe at the top of the second pass, and the fact that it only took cash.

Two days, not one

You can do this in a long day and you will hate the second half. Break it at the bottom of a valley, sleep, and do the remaining four passes in the morning when the light is across the road rather than down it.

The N2, End to End

Delphine Roy — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The N2 is Portugal’s Route 66, in the sense that it is a long old road that was made redundant by a motorway and then rediscovered by people who wanted the long version back. It runs from Chaves in the far north to Faro on the south coast, and it crosses eleven districts and four mountain ranges on the way.

What makes it good is not scenery, exactly. It is that the road still goes through things. Every twenty minutes there is a village with a bar, a church and four men outside the bar, and the motorway thirty kilometres west has taken all the traffic and left them alone.

Halfway, near Sertã, where they have made a small industry out of the road. Photo: Russell Butcher.

Seven days

Days one and two: Chaves down through the Douro. The hardest driving and the best views of the trip, in that order.
Day three: the Serra da Estrela crossing. Cold at the top in any month.
Days four and five: the middle, which is where the road is at its most itself: cork oaks, empty tarmac, nobody.
Days six and seven: the Alentejo and the drop to the coast.

The N2 is not a scenic route. It is an ordinary road through a country that stopped using it, which turns out to be a much rarer thing.

Practicalities

Get the passport stamped. There is a booklet, shops along the route stamp it, and it is exactly the sort of gimmick that turns out to be the best part. Otherwise: fuel in towns rather than villages, and do not trust an eight o’clock dinner outside the two ends.

The Coast Road in Bad Weather

Delphine Roy — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is a photograph of the Atlantic Road that everybody has seen: a bridge apparently curving into nothing, with a wave breaking over the parapet. It is not a trick shot and it is not summer. It is late autumn, which is when the place is actually worth eight hours in a car.

In July it is a pleasant coastal drive with a queue at the viewpoint. In October the wind comes in off open ocean with nothing between here and Iceland, the road gets closed perhaps twice a season, and standing on the causeway is a genuine physical event.

Inland from the coast road, an hour before the weather arrived properly. Photo: Efrem Efre.

Going in the bad half of the year

Check the road status, not just the forecast. Closures are posted and they are short.
Book somewhere on the road, not in Molde. The point is to be there at dusk and at dawn, not to drive out and back.
Take a tripod you trust. Everything worth photographing here happens in bad light and high wind.

Fine weather makes this a nice drive. Weather makes it the reason you came, and the two are barely the same road.

The rest of the loop

Do not treat it as a destination on its own — it is twenty minutes end to end. String it with the Trollstigen road while that is open, the ferry across to Averøy, and one night somewhere with a window facing west. That is a proper two days.