Early in the morning we woke to San Christobal Island. It was so nice to be able to go to bed with the boat sailing most nights - I absolutely love the rocking and rolling of sailing when in bed. Our cabin was above and I had the top bunk so I could lay in my bed and watch the ocean rise and fall and see the stars.....oh so nice. San Christobal has a town and an airport so, compared to the other inhabited islands, it seemed busy. Our first stop was the Interpr...

Ok, not exactly the group of Bachelors I was hoping for but....pretty amazing anyway. Up and out early to South Plaza Island - a very steep cliffed island formed by uplifted lava and covered by tree sized, stunningly beautiful, massive cactuses, endemic to the Galapagos. Also on this small island are 700 yellow and red lizards - pretty small after seeing the massive iguanas everywhere else. But they are not the big show on this little piece of land. That sh...

Day 2 started really really early – a 6 am hike to see wildlife. Yup – 6 am, before breakfast for a hike around North Seymour Island. We had sailed through the night and were in Seymour when we woke up, and after a fair bit of b****ing and complaining about the early hour, it was really great to be out before the heat of the day. And really great to see the frigate birds with their red chins blow them up into the size of beach balls to impress the...

Flying out of Quito at the break of dawn was really beautiful and permitted my only view of the city. It is built on the sides of a volcano and at 10,000 feew altitude it is the second highest capital city in the world. La Paz Bolivia is the highest. I didn't feel the altitude but Carolyn felt quite light headed.Our flight to the Galapagos had us flying Quito – Guyaquil, short stop and on to the islands….sounds fine…..OMG! We were conc...

After chucking our bags, mine small, Carolyn's huge – into the 'princess suite’ and realizing that the two bags combined took up 100 % of the floor space, we were beckoned to our first of many briefings. It was these briefings that I had read about on Galapagos blogs and forums that scared me about signing up for 8 days. Seems like there was going to be a lot of planned events, lots of rules and not much debate or free time. Not the greate...