Viking welcome

It has been an exhausting, hilarious, long, brilliant 24 hours. Stupidly thought getting to Heathrow last night in three hours was an achievement and hadn't really given much thought to the rest of the journey. The flight was a bit delayed and we landed in Iceland just after midnight. Then we waited for our bags to come out last and went to pick up our hire car. There were three car companies offering their services - two with completely empty desks and the third with a massive, very slow queue. Guess how that pricing structure had worked! We ended up wandering round the car park in a howling gale and driving rain at 2am, found our brand new car, dried out a bit while working out how to start it then followed the "ut" signs. I expertly navigated us to a nearby hotel I had booked us rooms, anticipating we might just want to go to bed at this point. Then Ella was laughing her head off, apparently I had been in the country for five minutes and was already directing her to places she had never been to before - as we arrived past all the ex-us army barracks in the arse end of nowhere we had a slight fanny around getting into the hotel, thankfully found five fabulous comfy beds and slept like the dead for a few hours. I can confirm it never gets properly dark at the moment, this was all conducted in a weird dusk, in the prissy rain with increasingly zombie children.

Up and out this morning to find our holiday appartment. Which is slap bang in the middle of Reykjavik and bloody fantastic. It has everything you might ever need and to Will's absolute delight, beds that go up and down and vibrate. He has been banned from the vibration when I am in the room, it makes a terrible sound.

Next up, tour of Reykjavik - it's such a lovey, small, unbusy city, full of lovely things to look at. We went to the top of the very tall church, had ice cream and hot dogs that presidents ate (except for me, i hate hot dogs), looked at the Houses of Parliament, the primer ministers house, the prison, a million and one puffin paraphernalia and lots of other things I can't remember now. They had laid on a parade to welcome us headed up by actual Vikings. Ella said it was a multi cultural parade to celebrate different ethnicities but obv she is wrong.

Then we drive to a dome thing and looked at more views and had more ice cream. It has been a really fabulous day. My children have selected different times to have complete melt downs( I am assuming to too little sleep last night rather than being horrible people) but I have blithely ignored all that. I do love coming to a new place!

Tomorrow we are going into the country and looking at all the natural bits and bobs. Early night first though I think. And a few extra photos today.