ICELAND: DAY FOUR

Any day is a good day when it starts out with you watching whales. Any day is a good day that ends with you lolling about in a thermal heated spring water pool

Ah, another day in Iceland. Life is brutal, eh

Collette and I started out searching for whales. And we found them. Three Minke whales, two of them a pair, something I'm told is unusual. The Minke whale is the only whale hunted in Iceland yet they did not appear to run from our boat. Either these whales are stupid, or Icelanders are really just poor hunters.

Finding whales is far from a guaranteed activity but we had an exceptional day for it, sunny and calm and relatively warm. Spotting Minke whales is a bit of an art form; the surface to breathe of course but they came up in a long curve of dark flesh, a blow of air, then back down again. They will do this three times in a row then go down for a deeper dive to breathe.

Predicting where they will surface was not easy but still, Collette did manage to shoot them .. I mean get a few shots. With her camera that is. We haven't "gone native" enough to start hunting whales.

Being Collette, she was not merely satisfied to caputre pictures of whales. She had to go after what may be the world's most bizarre looking yet cutest bird, the puffin

After the whale watching, we went exploring some of Icleand's incredible volcanic character. From a midge lake with its psuedo craters created by explosions of steam, to an awesome area of gigantic lava formations called the "dark fortress" ...

... to climbing up what surely was a mile or two (or so my lungs tried to tell me) to peer in a giant crater so Lunar like, it was used to train the Apollo astrounauts.

What is the solution to straining your gimply ankle and straining your couch potato lungs? As mentioned, lolling about in some thermally heated water.

Yes, we really are roughing it.