Icelandic Roads
Planning a road trip through the route #1, the so called ring road that connects the entire Iceland, one can see in the map that it's about 1300 Km (800 miles), that most of it is paved, and that gas stations can be found every 200Km (120 miles) or less. That's not bad at all.
What cannot be planned ahead are the small detours that one, pursing some adventure adrenaline, will end up doing through gravel roads, roads where the gravel will change into small rocks to become later what easily could be mistaken by pieces of a giant asteroid. Nor the rains turning a dirt road into a slippery mud one with an impressive cliff on the side. Or the sheep that performing some sort of obscure sheepy ritual, or perhaps a leap of faith, suddenly jump in front of one's car. Those are things that are usually difficult to plan ahead.
However, despite those roads to where destiny (or perhaps our impulse to explore remote places and mysterious fjords) led us, we didn't need a 4WD vehicle. We instead rented a small urban car through a local company with all the extra insurances (even one to cover us in case of ash and sand storm, after all we were in Iceland). And yes, that was enough (and cheaper than a 4WD).
An interesting thing about the roads here is how well signaled they are: Each farm has a sign indicating what services they provide (if any). From coffee and showers to horse rental and impossible to guess things, it seems like everything is signaled.
The initially planned 1300 Km ended up being almost 3000 (1800 miles) on an epic road trip of 10 days through exotic and diverse landscapes: lava fields thousands of years old, a giant glacier (one of the biggest ice caps between the poles), and remote towns around the Icelandic fjords, 4Km (2.8 miles) from the Arctic circle. The extra 1700 km were not in the original plan, but sometimes that's what traveling is about: To leave room for enjoying surprises. Same as life.
