Iceland

We arrived in Iceland very late. We took a taxi to our Airbnb apartment to discover a disaster. It was now about 1 AM and the address we were given didn't include a street number just the street name. The taxi driver was persistent as I pulled up a picture of the house and we tried to match it to various houses on the street. My first activity in Iceland was to trespass in the middle of the night checking for keys in flower pots up and down the street. Finally we found it! I was confident that the problem was all behind us. I had tried to call the host but there was no answer. They did not live in the house. We got inside but discovered that the room we thought was ours had not been cleaned or prepared for us with sheets and towels. I took pictures of the place and we left. Tom was able to hail a cab (a miracle at 3AM). Remember this is Iceland and it was still light out so Tom could see a cab at the end of the street.  We had the taxi take us to a hotel in Reykjavik and we explained our situation. The rates at that hotel were about 260 euros a night and we didn't want to pay that for a few hours of sleep. They were so kind and generous to us as we figured out what we wanted to do. They gave us breakfast, the use of their computers and they ended up making reservations for us. In the end we decided to rent a car and book a hotel for the next night outside of town. We got our rental car around 8 in the morning. We were operating on 0 hours of sleep but ended up having a great day doing the Golden Circle Route outside of Reykjavik. We had purchased a self driving tour booklet and a GPS with the car rental that made it simple to get around. We were able to see lots of fascinating sights before crashing at our hotel at about 3PM. We slept for several hours and then had a great dinner. I had contacted Airbnb and the host and we were reimbursed for most of it and the host offered that we could stay there for free. We decided to stay out of the city and along the route but to return to Reykjavik the night before we left for home. We stayed at the Airbnb and it was fine and convenient. That was not the way we wanted our holiday in Iceland to start out but in the end it worked out fine.