Til San Francisco Again

This morning we got up bright and early and breakfasted again on things we had bought at the grocery store Monday night. Instead of a run this morning we headed down to the docks to catch the "Puffin Express" out to a nearby island were something like 10,000 breeding pairs of puffins meet to mate every year. Puffins are monogamous and live for decades meeting up every here every year to make baby puffins with their chosen mates.

We couldn't have asked for a more beautiful sunny day out in the harbor. We were on a small boat, so the surf still tossed us around a good bit though. Neither of the kids fell overboard though. They enjoyed swtiching back and forth between the indoor and outdoor parts of the boat to catch all the views. In the distance we could see Snæfellsjökull, a 1400 m volcano over 150 km to the northwest. That's how clear the day was!

Evolutionarily puffins are somewhere between penguins and flying birds. They're really great swimmers and spend the winter just out floating on the Atlantic eating fish. They can fly, but have to beat their wings crazy fast to accomplish anything. The first time we saw one was actually on a boat in Svalbard where it skipped across the water while flapping like crazy to get away from our boat. We saw that repeated many a time today as there were birds all over around the island. It's incredible just how many gulls, geese, ducks, terns, and puffins were all on this safe little island out in the ocean. When you lay your eggs on or in the ground it's definitely the safest option though. Only birds out here.

Now we're on a flight to San Francisco after the long bus ride back through the lava fields to Keflavik. Iceland is a beautiful place I'm looking forward to coming back to soon, but man is it expensive! We're flying on Wow, which I think is short for "Wow, you're going to charge me for that too?!?"

A few hours later Zara is asleep next to me as I continue to work without wifi. What kind of trans-Atlantic airline doesn't offer wifi? At least she's no longer wiggling all over and militantly trying to snuggle me! She's a sweetheart, but I wish there were TVs in the back on the seats like there are on every other trans-Atlantic flight I've ever taken to occupy her with movies. I think she's going to like California though.

As for me I've caught up on quite a bit of reading and prepared for a smoother, duplicable onboarding process as my team grows and I look to offload some of that responsibility. With so much work to do it's easy to get lost in doing it without really choosing sensibly WHAT to work on.

Landing in SFO, all our bags made it and customs wasn't any trouble, but the car rental guy did try to trick us into an upgrade. Ah, California. After checking into our hotel I took a short run in the fading twilight up to YouTube headquarters while Cara enjoyed her first trip to Trader Joe's in a long time.