Day 3

We had a late start the next day. The house had a tv downstairs and Icelandic Netflix has Peppa Pig, so the boys had a great morning watching several episodes while we tried to get some sleep.

We eventually got up and drove over to the Harpa Concert Hall. The boys liked the honeycomb style windows.

It's unique and beautiful from the outside, too.

I thought this lady was taking pictures of the design like the rest of us, but she followed Perry around and was taking his picture.

We watched a short film about Iceland, which had some places we'd already seen and several more we were excited to see the rest of the week.

We had run by a local bakery that morning to load up on new things to try, so we ate those in the car with cream cheese before heading into our chocolate tour at omNom. The pretzel bagel and cheesy croissant things were probably our favorites.

Carbs, cheese, and chocolate. The perfect lunch.

The informational part was interesting and thankfully not drawn out, with a fun guide. It was a bit repetitive for John and I, who feel fairly educated on the subject already, and pretty dull for the boys. But we still learned new things, particularly about Iceland. Like they imported 100 cocoa trees to try and grow their own chocolate from start to finish. Even in their greenhouses, 99 of them died.

 

We sampled each stage of the chocolate. Scott did not care for the pre-roasted, unsweetened cocoa bean.

The tour guide said he didn't think Perry could be any cuter, but then we put the hair net on and that did it.

Jonah did not want to wear the hair net or booties, but eventually I persuaded him and he was glad when he got to the sampling table.

It was definitely superior chocolate. And not too overpriced considering it was Iceland, where everything costs 4x what it would at home already.

We had a really delicious dinner close by at Icelandic Fish and Chips. It felt like a perfect balance of trying traditional/local food, but not eating rotten shark.

We ran to the car to get going for our appointment at the Blue Lagoon.

I'd read that it was an overpriced, touristy swimming pool, but everything we saw about Iceland included pictures and we didn't want to regret skipping it, so we decided to try it out. 

It was fabulous! Warm water, clean, beautiful, relaxing, face masks, drinks, showers.

The kids loved it, and we hadn't scheduled anything specifically for them, so it was nice to see them really enjoying themselves. After a couple hours, Perry was getting hot, so I showered and dressed with him and we went back to take a picture before the others got out.

You could swim into the main room and take the staircase right out to the locker rooms. It was so steamy everywhere.

We ended up totally loving it and would definitely go back. It was a lovely ambiance at night, but we want to try during the day, too, so we can see more outside. It was a rejuvenating activity, perfectly situated in the middle of our trip.