The best laid plans. . .

Okay, day one of our Nordic adventure, and already the hiccups just keep coming. This, despite the fact that we’ve been planning since February!  The first surprise we found the minute we landed at Keflavik airport.  

After we got off the plane we found that Randy had told the car rental people we were arriving at 10:00 and actually, we arrived at 7:00 so we were 3 hours early for the car rental people, but we called them and they indeed did come and get us and took us some 15 miles to the car rental place and we rented this beat to hell tiny old Hyundai. Then they tell us we're restricted on miles to 100km per day is about 60 miles; it's 50 miles just to get from the airport to Reykjavik so obviously that wouldn't do, then they also told us since Randy was old fart we had to pay another $60 because he was a senior exception. Then evidently to get unlimited mileage on this car was going to cost us $150 euros. We bit the bullet and got that all straightened out and we took off in this beat up old Hyundai for the day and RG was having a lot of trouble with the stick; if you didn't push the clutch all the way to the floor you just ground the gears something horrible.  We should have insisted on a better car. 

 The second issue was lodging.  As I’m writing this, we have actually landed in a decent hotel for the night, albeit not the one I thought I had booked.  As we had lost our (non-existent) Reykjavik booking yesterday, we changed our whole plan; we decided to just power through the fact that we'd been up all night and head out for our initial destination for day one, the golden circle. In a big rush, yesterday morning before we left, I had made a reservation at a place called Arbakki Farmhouse Lodge up near Gulfoss.  We did make three of our sites, Pingvellir, the Geysir, and Gullfoss, by which time we were working on fumes and decided to head for the lodge. We found it, I went to check in, and I can’t even imagine what Randy thought when I returned to the car to tell him that I had somehow managed to book it for September 14th, not June 14th.  There was another couple just unloading their car next to ours; I imagine they had a good laugh about the idiot woman they just met. Now we had to try to find anything we could find on my phone which is rapidly running out of battery even though I've had it connected to the car all day it's down to about 8%.  We were tired beyond belief. Keeping in mind that it is tourist season and this whole area is very small, at first we found a place that was a guest house with a shared bathroom shared by six people; okay, we were going to do it, as it beat sleeping in the car, but then we got there and I just couldn't do it.  I persisted on my phone, and somehow we did manage to find a hotel some 15 miles away.  We actually have a double bedroom with our own bathroom, it's clean as a whistle, very Nordic looking, and best of all it has a restaurant and bar because we are so tapped out we can't go another mile in the car. We are just done in but we've had a great first day; we had a breakfast in Reykjavik that was very good, we visited Hallgrimm’s Church, then set out across the countryside to see some interesting sights.