Kaleidoscopic Topics

Puffins take a summer stop-over in Heimey, Iceland - Blog for July 9, 2023  We had hoped be able to take close up photos of a few of the millions of puffins that stop here briefly every summer for their young. However, it turns out that puffins nest high on cliffs like these beautiful sights that greeted us this morning when we docked off the Westman Islands in Heimey.... Heimey is one of the major puffin stopovers in the world. Iceland Review website (Retieved July 9 at https://www.icelandreview.com/ask-ir/when-do-puffins-arrive-in-iceland/) "Puffins spend much of their life at sea and are actually only in Iceland for a relatively short time to breed and nest. They tend to arrive in Iceland beginning in April (usually later in the month, just before May) and generally begin to leave in August. " Although we didn't get any close-ups of live puffins here's a photo of the next best thing: Not to worry, here's a photo I Googled just now (July 25, 2023) of an actual p...

July 3 and 4, 2023   Actually, we enjoyed a great fireworks show back in our hometown in New Jersey on Saturday, July 1, on the eve of our flight to Iceland to catch our cruise ship. Having arrived in Reykjavik on July 3 we had plenty of time for our first shore-excursion; whale-watching off the bay of Reykjavik. I snapped the photo below of the Harpa Concert Hall as we headed out, but my husband got a terrific photo of the interior... Here's my husband's photo of the inside of Harpa. (Dang! I should have gotten one myself, but it slipped my mind while I was admiring the way the light plays through these colorful windows whose shapes are inspired by the basalt columns that make up so much of Iceland's geology...) The Harpa (Its name is inspired by the musical instrument NOT the harpoon!) overlooks Faxaflói  Bay, where we set out for our four-hour whale-watching excursion on a little motorboat that seated maybe 100 people.  You can find out a lot more about the Harpa's a...

 July 3, 2023.   I hope you like the photo. James and I are embarking on a Viking cruise around Iceland to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary.  (Actually our anniversary is August 7, but James has Independence Day Week off from work.) My husband and I are on a Viking cruise-liner, docked at Reykjavík, Iceland's  capital city, and our starting point for a 6-day cruise around Iceland to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary!!!  Earlier this evening we went whale watching on a smaller boat. I felt very brave (and very cold and exhausted afterwards), but we actually saw several fin-waves of humpback whales. 🐋  Actually we could just quickly see the fins and occasionally the tails of these whales, as they would come up for a split second or two. It was lot of fun, and, I thought, almost comical, because it took my mind briefly off the rocking of the boat (I didn't feel sick or anything, but everyone on the boat had to grab onto something whenever we w...