Tag: Trip

Addendum to last years trip to Iceland, part one

After the disappointment last June when Amanda (my sister in law) and I had our whale and puffin watching excursion cancelled,

All togged up but our trip was cancelled at the very last minute

we promised ourselves we’d go to see some British puffins this year. And oh boy did we see puffins, we felt like mini David Attenboroughs.

And as we can see this little puffin is busy lining their nest with bracken


We booked ourselves an AirBnB in Milford Haven. Not your usual chocolate box seaside holiday destination, but actually there’s a very nice promenade overlooking the harbour that draws the eye away from the oil and gas refinery. Its all newly built and above the shops and fancy restaurants there’s some rather nice apartments.

The view from our appartment

We were all set for our trip to Skomer Island. We’d booked 2 trips, the first was a sunset cruise around the island. We togged up very well cause although the sun was shining, the wind was also competing for supremacy.

in our icelandic sweaters of course


We were amazed by the number of puffins we saw both flying and bobbing around. My camera skills and equipment doesn’t quite make BBC standards for wildlife photography so you’ll just have to believe me that there were not hundreds, but thousands of these comical little birds, entertaining us,  crash landing into the sea, cause they arent the most graceful fliers.

I think these are guilemots

And we didn’t just see puffins, but many other seabirds as well, kitiwakes, manx shearwater, gannets, gulls, storm petrel, fulmar, guillemots and razorbills. Or at least according to our very informative guide we saw them all. We also saw a peregrine falcon, a blackbird and a Robin.

Puffins in the water and I think kitiwakes on the cliff


And we saw common grey seals and harbour porpoise

Apparently the week before there were over 200 seals on this beach

It was an exhilarating trip

We got what we wanted, we saw puffins the sunset and Wales


The next morning our beautiful view was somewhat obscured,


But it didn’t dampen our spirits because one of us had a birthday to celebrate

One thing we discovered, that as a tourist, the Pembrokeshire coast is heavily geared towards outdoor attraction (and quite rightly so) we drove over to St David’s and enjoyed the cathedral but the rain was coming down in barrel fulls and even exploring the little streets wasn’t much fun. Outdoor attractions need sunshine, cause despite there being lots of castles in the area, non of them still have a roof.

St David’s Cathedral

And of course as soon as we called it quits and trudged home for a nice meal in one of the fancy restaurants,

the sun came out and provided a bit of a sunset

And we went to bed looking forward to the night day tomorrow