San Cristobal — The Galapagos part 1

I’m going to add some excerpts from my journal to tell this story to speed up this process or this post is never gonna make it.  Here we go:

(Elle is deeply pondering those sea lions up there I think.)

After we had hung out with those sea lions for a while (the sun and the beach felt Heavenly), we walked over to the Centro de Interpretacion, which was pretty fascinating to me.

Lots of information about Charles Darwin and Survival of the Fittest and the history of the Galapagos.

So much information to ponder about the creation and how it intersects with his book On The Origin of Species which led to some discussions about life in general.  I took pictures of a bunch of the interesting facts at that place, but it’s probably more cohesively put together HERE if you want to check it out.

Before dinner we had met up with the guy who was helping us get to Kicker Rock the next day…and he surprisingly agreed that it would be ok for Elle and Grace to scuba dive with me and Dave.  Elle had had an introductory dive a few years ago but Grace had never done it.  But honestly, we found the BEST dive master to train and get them ready.

I just found these pictures today and Dave’s expression makes me smile.

He is the best, most protective Dad and he sure wanted to be sure these girls understood every detail 🙂

We got outfitted with double wetsuits to take with us the next day.  We would need them!

Lucy wasn’t about to wear that thing though…

Back to the hotel for our traditional card games:

You see, December is the beginning of the warm season in Ecuador.  So as a side-note, this is from a website HERE to describe the water this time of year:
Late December to June is considered the warm and wet season…Around December, the trade winds fall and the climactic equator (located north of the geographic equator) shifts south toward the Galapagos, causing the westward-flowing current to slow, reducing the upwelling and allowing warmer water from the Panama Current to bathe the archipelago…During El Niño, [December] trade winds slow in the central and western Pacific causing the warmest water to shift to the east, …When the warm water shifts east, the cold water thermocline layer near South America drops lower into the ocean. The surface water temperature rises significantly and the supply of colder, nutrient-rich water is cut off.

They had told us about this the night before, but it was so interesting to experience it while scuba diving.  The water looked almost gel-like under there with the cold and warm currents mixing…so tough to describe, but in the cold parts man alive were we ever happy for those double-wetsuits!

Our newest scuba divers, ready for their mini lesson before the dive:

We got to hang on a beautiful beach while Jacob, the dive master worked with the girls a little.

It threatened rain for a little while but ended up being a gorgeous day.

Thank Heavens Claire brought an extra book because by this time Lucy had already breezed through all four books she had brought.

There are the big girls out with Jacob:

Then we were ready.

Here’s how Lucy spent her day:

This picture depicts the excitement:

And here’s Claire’s excitement to snorkel with a bunch of strangers who became friends from all over the world.

Love that girl so much and her excitement for life.  She thought it was the best day ever.

And then we were off into the deep blue.

These pictures can’t do it justice, but at least they give an idea…we saw tons of these little Galapagos sharks:

We did two dives.

A little from my journal:


The scuba diving was different from any other scuba diving
I’ve done.  Lots of dark fish, lots of
little sharks (so cool), gorgeous colorful walls on both sides of the main
crevice we explored, and this really strange thermal effect of the different
currents meeting up with each other (normal and freezing water meeting up)
creating this kind of gel-like look. 
Really interesting.  We’d be
swimming along all fine and then get in this freezing current.  We were on the look-out for hammerhead
sharks, didn’t see any, but there was something so amazing about being down
there with Dave and our two girls.  Later
I found out that Dave had been kind of freaking out with worry…he got down
there and went into a panic …worst-case scenarios started catapulting themselves around in his brain
and he couldn’t turn them off.  But by
the second dive he realized they’d be ok (they had both come out positively
beaming with excitement…Grace was dancing for the goPro under there for crying out loud), and there was something surreal about that dive,
surrounded by those people I adore in that quiet underwater world, sending up
those beautiful luminous scuba bubbles we love so much to the surface where
Claire was snorkeling with her new friends, and Lucy with her nose in her latest book on the boat with the
Spanish-only speakers as her companions. 
It was just one of those days where all was right in the world. 

…and the aftermath:

(Yep, still reading…)

Back to land and some marine iguanas waiting for us…

…we’d see many more of them the next day…

In looking at these pictures yesterday Claire told me this was her favorite night.  Which I thought was funny because there were plenty of exciting nights.  But there was a little park right across from our hotel and we hung out there for a while before dinner…swinging and then the girls created an obstacle course.

There was something about the feeling in the air and everyone so happy, helping Lucy on the obstacle course, timing each other and cheering that was just so good.

Then later according to my journal: