Heather's friend Fed once said that the enjoyment of a trip was directly related to the weather. This was true of our trip to Iceland. The weather in February is hit-and-miss, and we had a miss. We were prepared for rain and cold, but not 80km/h winds! Our main reason for choosing Iceland in the winter was to see the Northern Lights. We had only one cloudless evening, but the Northern Lights didn't appear that night :( We haven't had much luck with celestial events, having a very cloudy day for the recent solar eclipse in Apr 2024, and a hazy night for the lunar eclipse in Nov 2022. I think technically the Northern Lights aren't a celestial event, but it's in the sky and seeing them is dependent on lack of clouds.
The tourist-local ratio in Iceland is much higher than we usually prefer. I couldn't believe the volume of traffic on the road from Laugarvatn to Reykjavík. It was a continuous stream of cars, campervans and buses, in low season. We did do the most popular things in Iceland, which contributed to us running into high number of tourists. The Golden Circle is visited by over 2 million people per year. The sites are popular for a reason though — they are prety cool to see. It's on our list to see the sites around the Diamond Circle in the northeast (like Dettifoss and Goðafoss), but this is pretty busy too — 360,000 people visited in 2019, compared to Akureyri's population of about 20,000.
There is beautiful scenery in Iceland, and I'm sure even nicer when things are green. The drive along the shoreline to Vík was gorgeous, up there with some of the best road trips we've taken. The food was excellent too. It's possible to hike slightly past the main sites and get away from the crowds.
Overall I found Iceland a beautiful place to visit, but probably a bit over-touristed for my liking (given the small population), even in low season. Probably we will head to other places on our list before going back to see the rest of Iceland in the summer.
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