Thursday, March 17th – Afternoon Excursion-Fernandina, Espinoza Point

**We will post photos when we return and have normal internet connection!!

The afternoon excursion took us to Fernandina Island to view hundreds and hundreds of marine iguanas. We hiked over lava fields and came to a point where approximately 100 marine iguanas were sun bathing with many on top of one another to keep warm. Every few seconds you hear this snorting noise as marine iguanas need to de-saltinate and spit salt water out their snout. Not a great sight to see. We continued our walk and saw numerous sea lions and even came upon the flightless cormorants. Flightless cormorants are just what their name states, flightless.

This walk involved many sea lion viewings. With sea lions, there will be a beach master, a male sea lion, who controls certain areas of the female population. He is constantly being challenged by other males and typically after three weeks, will lose his spot. We came upon the beach master for this area, and this particular sea lion definitely needed to go on weight watchers! We had never seen one so large until now! He barked quite frequently at us and even came up to guard one of his girlfriends and her young pup. As we continued our walk to another area populated by sea lions, in one crevice, we spotted a baby sea lion, only around six weeks old. He seemed stuck in this crevice, but managed to shimmy his way up and received many cheers from our group. Another female came over and started playing with the baby and soon they were off swimming and chasing each other in the water. It was so adorable. I just wanted to take a baby seal home with me.

Interesting things to note:

*We ate breakfast with Mark’s daughter and her boyfriend. She works State Department and does frequent traveling, having been to 56 countries. So much for thinking I had been to quite a few countries already!

* At breakfast today, our waiter brought me a diet coke without informing him of my drink choice. He has figured out what I like to drink in the am.

*The naturalists on the ship work four weeks on, two weeks off, while the cruise director works two weeks on, two weeks off.

*I absolutely love eggs. I use to eat them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner when I was little. To this day, I could still eat scrambled eggs all the time. That was until I tried the eggs on the ship here. I don’t recall if we wrote that all the food the ship provides comes from Ecuador. That way, they help the economy. Well, they must feed their chickens some different feed because the taste is quite odd, and to be blunt, quite disgusting too.

*Ted and I were getting sick of eating food in the main dining hall so we ordered a pizza last night to eat on the deck at sunset. It was probably one of the better meals we had actually. Pepperoni pizza which actually tasted more like hot dog pizza.