A Whale of a Day

Sam:

Today we went on a boat trip and got to see tons of puffins and about 15 whales. We also went to a whale museum – the blue whale skeleton was so cool.

The mud pits were really smelly. They were kind of neat, though, because they were bubbling.

Charlotte:

Today we took a one hour trip to go whale watching and puffin watching. It was very cold out there, so we had to wear warm suits. The whales were very cool and the puffins – I wanted to see even more of them. It was three whole hours on the boat!

We also went to a steaming mud pit. It was disgusting! I felt like I was going to barf! It was more disgusting than anything I ever smelled before.

We saw a waterfall, too. It was very wet. We climbed on the rocks.

Mom and Dad:

As we write this post, we both are completely exhausted! It was another amazing day!

After a quick breakfast, we hopped in the car and were on our way. We drove east towards Lake Myvatn. The plan was to start our day hiking to a cave that was in Game of Thrones. Instead, we ended up stopping at Godafoss – a beautiful waterfall – along our route and then making our way to Namafjull.

Namafjull is one of the weirdest/most interesting places we’ve ever been! It’s a bit like how Mars looks on videos. It’s a barren, mountainous landscape with many bubbling, steaming mud pits. The sulphur smell was overwhelming in places (Brad almost puked at one point and Charlotte complained incessantly). We decided against hiking up the mountain for a different perspective, as we didn’t want to be late for our boat trip.

It was a bit of a drive to Husavik, but as usual, Iceland didn’t disappoint. We passed some seriously incredible lava fields and a smelly turquoise lake.

Husavik is a quaint little coastal community that is famous for whale watching. We had booked a whale and puffin excursion, but we had a couple hours before we needed to board the boat. We went for lunch at a hole-in-the-wall fish and chips place by the pier. Brad and the kids loved the fish and we all liked the chips.

Next, we went to check out the Whale Museum. It was small but filled with lots of great information and skeletons/models of many different kinds of whales. It was a surprisingly good way to spend an hour!

Finally it was time to go on our boat tour. We boarded and got our gigantic sailing onesies on. We started by going to Puffin Island to see where tons of puffins come to mate and have babies each summer. There are literally over 200,000 of them! Hey, did you know that puffins’ colourful beaks are just shells over their actual beaks, and they fall off when they migrate in the autumn?

After visiting with Charlotte’s new dream pets, we turned our attention to searching for whales. During our tour, I’m super-excited to report that we saw a minke whale and many humpback whales! At one point, we were lucky enough to see two humpbacks swimming together, which is very rare.