A day with the seals

The Icelandic summer seems to be asleep and the meteorological site announces the low, middle and high level clouds as very sticky. An ideal day to hang around in a museum. 

The Icelandic Seal museum is a great place to learn all about seals. The small museum provides a lot of information for people of all ages. There are many exponates of different kind of seals, a fisherman's boat and boards with Sagas around seals or you just sit down in cosy armchairs to browse some litterature and scientific papers. Rounded up with a little theatre showing a film or more interactive the digitalized journey of a seal pup's first year of life including GPS tracking of its journey through the bays of northern Iceland. For the kids there is some activity like weighting the amount of fish a seal eats a day or sitting in a wooden boat and play with plushy puffins and seals, reading picture books or colouring marine mammals. 

Time was just passing by and we had to set off to keep our chance to see some seals at the spots around Vatnsnes peninsula. The chance to see them laying around at low tide is much higher than at high tide when they are normally out to catch some fish.

Limited views and the surrounding a variety of grey Hvitserkur was the only planned sight seeing for the day. We took the 711 anticlock wise and just stopped for some Icelandic horses to pass. At Hvitserkur we first had put our rain gear on as it was drizzling on this side of the peninsula. The petrified troll was not as big as we have expected him, but still pretty cool even in miserable weather conditions. By not catching the right path to the shore most likely we missed the first chance to see some seals, but as the road was not as bad as described we just headed on to the next spot.

We had the chance to see them in both locations (Illungastadir & Svalbard). Not in very close distance, still close enough to observe them for a while. At Illungastadir we took the chance of the nice flat grass patch to play some footbal before and after our Sandwich lunch.

After a short stop at the lighthouse on the way back, we returned "home" with some great impressions around the Seals and mud packed car :)