BC-based travel advisor Courtney Morin drove Iceland's entire Ring Road with G Adventures in June and came home with a professional conviction: this country is too extraordinary to rush through on a layover.
At a Glance
Iceland's Ring Road in June offers nearly continuous daylight, allowing travellers to experience multiple distinct landscapes—glaciers, black sand beaches, geothermal fields—in a single day. A local guide provides cultural context, including Icelandic folklore beliefs, while small-group travel balances structure with discovery. Advance bookings are essential for popular activities.
It is midnight in rural Iceland, and a farmer has just climbed onto his tractor to mow the fields. The sky outside Courtney Morin's window is the pale gold of a late afternoon rather than the deep black of night. Nobody inside the small guesthouse seems entirely sure whether to laugh or simply stare. Morin, a travel advisor based in British Columbia, chose to stare. "It's midnight and we head back to our rooms and you look out the window and you've got the farmer starting his tractor to do his mowing at midnight," she recalls, the delight still audible in her voice. It was, she says, one of those moments that no brochure could have prepared her for, and precisely the kind of moment she now uses to explain to clients why Iceland deserves so much more than a long weekend layover.
A Solo Traveller Who Travels with Others
Morin made the journey in June, a deliberate choice rooted in years of professional instinct and a personal love of light. As a solo female traveller, she has developed a clear preference for small-group travel, the kind that offers structure and companionship without sacrificing the feeling of real discovery. She booked the trip with G Adventures, joining a group of sixteen travellers for a full circumnavigation of Iceland's Ring Road. The itinerary took the group along coastlines and into the interior, through fishing villages and across geothermal fields, from the capital outward into a landscape that, for much of the journey, showed no buildings and very few people. "Most of the population does live in the capital of Reykjavik," Morin notes, "so once you get out of the main town, you're not seeing a lot of people, you're not seeing a lot of buildings, and that's what I treasured the most — that kind of escape from the busy city centre."
The decision to travel in June proved its logic almost immediately. Near the summer solstice, daylight in Iceland stretches so far into the evening that the concept of a day's end becomes genuinely flexible. Morin found that the long light hours allowed the group to pack experiences into each day in a way that a winter itinerary simply could not replicate. By the time dinner was finished, there was still enough golden sky to justify another drive, another detour, another look.
Four Worlds in a Single Day
If there is one passage from Morin's account that captures what the Ring Road actually feels like, it is this: "You're looking at a glacier lake filled with icebergs and climbing to the top of a glacier, and then you're at the beach running around the black sand and it feels like you're back on the west coast, and then you drive one hour and it almost feels like you're walking on Mars with the steam coming out from the ground." She delivers this sequence almost without pausing, as if the landscape itself is still moving beneath her. Coming from British Columbia, a province not exactly short on dramatic scenery, Morin admits the scale of Iceland's variety genuinely caught her off guard. The dramatic landscapes, she says, really shocked her. Iceland managed to make a traveller from BC feel as though she had left the planet entirely.
What made this shape-shifting quality so affecting was its pace. The group would step out of their small shuttle and find themselves, without warning, standing in a field of wildflowers, or on the rim of a geothermal vent with steam rising through the ground around their boots, or at the edge of black sand that stretched to the waterline like something from a different geological era. "Iceland transformed itself every time we seemed to step out of our small shuttle," Morin says. "You were just in a different place with different landscapes." For an advisor accustomed to building itineraries for clients, the experience reordered her sense of what a single destination could contain.
The Stories Beneath the Surface
The group's guide was a local Icelandic woman, and her presence shaped the journey in ways that a self-drive itinerary could not have replicated. Beyond navigating the Ring Road's long driving days, she offered something less tangible but equally valuable: a window into how Icelanders actually understand their own country. Morin found herself particularly struck by the subject of folklore. "A lot of people in Iceland still believe in elves and trolls and mythical mystical creatures," she explains, "and just hearing that that is truly a belief for the people of Iceland, I thought was really interesting." The guide shared Icelandic mythology not as tourist entertainment but as lived cultural reality, tracing stories that stretched back centuries and still informed the way communities thought about the land around them. For Morin, it added an intellectual texture to the journey that pure landscape travel cannot always provide.
Where to Eat, and Why It Matters
Food was not, Morin admits, something she had expected to become a highlight. Iceland is an expensive destination by nature, a consequence of its remoteness and the cost of importing almost everything the country does not produce itself. But the G Adventures guide knew where to send the group, and that local knowledge turned out to be one of the trip's most memorable gifts. "I now know that Höfn has the best famous langoustine, so that was delicious to try," Morin says, naming the small eastern harbour town with the confidence of someone who has actually sat down and eaten there. "And I also discovered skyr yogurt, which as far as I know is only made in Iceland." These are the specifics that a client simply cannot find in a generic travel guide, and Morin is candid that without a local guide embedded in the experience, she likely would never have found them.
Who This Trip Is Really For
Morin is equally direct about who should book Iceland and who might be better served elsewhere. A love of nature is non-negotiable, she says. So is a willingness to adapt to changing weather, a comfort with uneven terrain, and a genuine appetite for spending most of each day outside. The Ring Road also requires an acceptance of long travel days, hours spent looking out the window at a landscape that rewards patience rather than constant stimulation. Iceland is not, she adds, a budget destination, and anyone approaching it as one is likely to be frustrated. "This has to be one of those bucket list trips," she says plainly.
Advance planning, Morin stresses, is no longer optional. She remembers a time, two decades ago, when backpackers could simply arrive and figure things out as they went. That era has passed for Iceland. The Blue Lagoon, glacier hikes, whale watching, all of them require bookings made well ahead of departure. "With Iceland becoming more of a popular destination, travellers need to plan ahead," she says, positioning this not as a warning but as a reason to work with someone who already knows the calendar and the logistics.
Make It the Destination, Not the Detour
The professional insight Morin brings home from the Ring Road is one she now shares with every client who mentions Iceland in passing. "So many clients choose to go to Iceland as a stopover destination or just spend three or four nights in Reykjavik," she says. "From this trip what I took away is: if you have the time and you can work it in, make Iceland your destination." A direct flight from Vancouver makes the logistics straightforward. The summer daylight makes the timing easy to justify. And the Ring Road makes the case for itself the moment a traveller steps out of a shuttle onto a black sand beach and looks up to find a glacier on the horizon.
For Morin, Iceland has moved from a place she knew about to a place she understands, and the difference shows in how she talks about it. Her next adventure is already taking shape. Borneo is high on the list, drawn by the same balance of nature, wildlife, and culture that has guided her travel instincts for years. Her clients can expect her back with the same specificity she brought home from the Ring Road: the right town, the right timing, and the kind of quiet conviction that only comes from having actually been there.
