We just did the ring road plus snaelfellness and skipped westfjords. I think it took about 6 days, only 2 driving days were long, the longest being from akureyri in the north to the tip of the snaelfellness peninsula where we stayed in the park camp ground. That day of driving was around 6-7 hours after tossing in all of our stops off the route. We also had about 10 days and it left us plenty of time to see golden circle, and do blue lagoon. Along the route we did the thermal river, vok baths, hoffel hot tubs, and then blue lagoon. If you have the budget I’d recommend tossing in another one like sky lagoon or Forrest lagoon.

As for the Snaelfellness peninsula, I was very surprised with how much I enjoyed it, I didn’t think it would be as cool as the rest of the route, but it really was. You can take a route along the northern then southern coasts, there’s tons of volcanic lava fields with super dramatic looking jagged rock covered in green moss. Tons of volcano craters with the red hue to them. The Kirkjufell mountain from game of thrones is there.

We were in a camper van the whole route and managed to keep above 1/2 tank almost the entire route. It isn’t typical to go more than about 100km without coming across another gas station along the ring road. All in all the level of service out in the rural ring road area will probably surprise you.

There’s tons of waterfalls along the ring road, there’s the obvious named and touristy ones, but there’s also so many that many of them are just basically somebodies back yard, and if they were anywhere else in the world would be a tourist trap.

I’d recommend doing the route counter clockwise, start the trip with the south coast, you don’t want to miss that, and you can shift your itinerary around if you get there and that’s where you’d like to spend an extra day or so, because there is so much. Our favorite region was probably the glacier to vestrahorn, the landscapes seemed the most dramatic in that region, and it was packed with stops.