Need to back up a couple of days to tell you about our attempt to see the northern lights. We had had several days of clear skies so Scott said he was going to wake up at 3 AM and go outside to see if the northern lights were visible. My response was “wake me if they are there; otherwise let me sleep”!  I did hear him get up, get dressed and drive away ( to get away from the lights around the hotel). That is all I recall as I fell asleep again. The next morning I asked what happened and Scott said he sat for about 20 minutes in the absolute dark but then saw some light on the horizon which he realized was probably the early sign of dawn. We came back and went to sleep. Later we learned that people did see the lights around midnight; we were simply too late. Last night was also fairly clear and the hotel we were at asked if we wanted to be wakened if northern lights appeared. Of course, was our response. The sad news is the call never came so witnessing the aurora borealis is still on my bucket list!

Back to today.  We had to hurry to Husavik, which calls itself  “the Whale Spotting Capital of the World” for our 10 AM whale watching trip off the north coast of Iceland. We have learned that driving always takes longer than you expect in Iceland.perhaps it is that distances are not far but roads are not often straight point to point.  Spotting whales here is over 95% successful as the bay is loaded with bait and whales flock here for the summer to feed.  Many different whale species appear and you never know which species might be there when you go looking for them.

We donned insulated “coveralls” before we left on a classic wooden sailing vessel called the “Gardar”.  The seas were calm and the weather cooperated by only being cloudy, but rain was specter later in the day. I am always skeptical about claims of high success rates for seeing whales. Today I was wrong as we spotted three different humpback whales on multiple surfacing during the 1+ hour we were out in the bay where they feed. I even got a pretty good shot of the whale with about half his body out of the water, something our guide said was rare for humpbacks. There was also a white-nosed porpoise sighting but I, myself, did not see it. Near the end of our 3 hour cruise,they served us hot chocolate and a cinnamon roll- a nice touch.

We grabbed a quick hot soup lunch at a local harbor restaurant and proceeded to go to the whaling museum that comes highly recommended, where we spent about 1.5 hours learning more about the different whale species and seeing many skeletons of different whales. They even have one of a blue whale, the world’s largest whale.

By the time we emerged from the whale museum it was close to 3 PM and it had begun raining. We decided we needed to start heading for our hotel for the evening. When we plugged in the coordinates to the GPS we learned we had a 5 hour drive ahead of us. Yikes, we had not counted on that and had we known we might have shortened the whale museum visit. Off we went, driving without a stop except for gas and a quick hamburger for dinner. We did get there before dark and called it a night fairly quickly.