Travel trivia: How long does it take for a blue-footed male to be found and accepted by a blue-footed female? About a month, assuming it's working hard to make itself attractive, meaning the feet turn just the right color blue. Sometimes us humans have it so easy.

Yesterday was a pretty long day. Up at 4:15, off to Galapagos where we boarded the islander around 11:30. Then getting settled in at the ship, which entails unpacking, being introduced to the crew (we like the masseuse-on-staff feature), the boat customs, and practicing an abandon ship routine.

I'm a morning person. I don't mind getting up at 4:15. And this airport run was soooooo much smoother than the first run I did last week. I did not have to stand in line to get my Galapagos access card; I did not have to carry my own luggage through the scanners; I did not have to check myself in. I basically just needed to show up, and show my passport as I went to the gates. And I did not have to pay $100 at the entrance, so I was not at risk of my passport getting confiscated again. A cool feature is that the luggage we checked we saw last at the airport, and then next in our cabin. It pays to, how do you say, uh, pay.

If yesterday morning was a seen-it-done-it-been-there for yours truly magnificent global traveler (and many people do raise their eyebrows when they hear I just made this journey last week to go dive here), yesterday afternoon promised to be much of the same. Let's go bird watching at North Seymour. Remember Seymour? Where the name implies you'd "see more" but visibility while diving was not very good? Yeah, let's go do that again. I'm excited.

But as we all know, promises are meant to be broken. Not all promises. Some promises are forever, and that's a might long time, but I'm here to tell you there's something else… wait, getting off track here. So the promise broken was that I wouldn't see more than I already didn't see the first time. First, it was a most unusual glorious day. Not a spec of white or grey in the sky, just blue. So visibility was great. And we got off the boat and had to be careful not to trip over the sea lion we all almost missed. We went from sea lions to birds to iguanas to cactuses and back around again. You should check out some of the pictures we took. Birds were calling their mates, which is a fascinating process, and some of them were sheltering and protecting their young. Sea lions were feeding their cubs. We were so incredibly close to the animals and they weren't impressed by us. We'd literally be just 2 feet away - or less. And the late afternoon sunlight was blessing us all with the best light to capture it all. It was spectacular.

Today is a really busy day. We start with a hike at 6:30 and go all day. More pictures to select and upload and another blog to write. I'm falling behind! Will try to catch up with yesterday's and today's pictures tonight, and put a little more of the story into the pictures itself.