Puffin Express is the wonderfully descriptive name of a boat tour from Special Tours. You’ll see puffins, and you’ll get to see them quickly!
The boat leaves from the old harbor in Reykjavik, as do most boat tours that leave from Reykjavik. Here’s your boat:
As soon as you leave the pier, you’ll start getting some spectacular views of Reykjavik. The concert hall Harpa: [Read more…] about Puffin Express boat ride with Special Tours
If you’re driving around Ring Road, when you’re up north you’ll pass very close to the town of Hvammstangi. There aren’t a ton of things to see around this part of Iceland, so the wooden sign in the shape of a seal might catch your attention. (I don’t think I took a picture of the sign, but you can see it here!)
That sign advertises the Icelandic Seal Center, which is a museum and research center. The museum is nice (and it’s just down the street from a grocery store, which can be few and far between in this part of the country!) More on the museum later. At the museum you can purchase tickets for a seal watching boat ride. That gets you a roughly 90 minute boat ride out to some places where seals like to lounge about.
There’s the boat you’ll be on; it sits about a 1 minute walk from the museum. Our first interaction with the guide, and possibly yours as well, will be the guide trying to talk you out of the tour. It can be a rough ride based on the weather and wind; full refunds are offered freely if you don’t think you’re up for it. I liked this– they definitely don’t want you to have a bad experience! [Read more…] about Seal watching boat trip with the Icelandic Seal Center
In our quest to visit as many museums in Reykjavik as we can, this morning we took the short boat ride to Viðey Island. It seems strange to call an island a museum, but it is indeed one of the Reykjavik City Museums.
[Read more…] about Monday, August 1 update, part 1: Viðey Island
We have loved our whale watching trips out of both Húsavík and Reykjavik. But I recently discovered that Special Tours does something that I haven’t seen anywhere else: they meticulously document every single whale watching trip they take. How many whales did they see? How was the weather? It’s really quite impressive.
Having had our fill of whale watching trips, we decided to try something a little bit different: Sea Angling with Special Tours.
[Read more…] about Wednesday, July 27 Update Part 2: Sea Angling with Special Tours
While some of the family spent the day in Akureyri, the rest of us headed to Húsavík, the self-proclaimed whale capital of Iceland. On the way (well, only slightly out of the way) we stopped at Laufás, a museum featuring a turf house from the 1840s:
