The only lizard that feeds in the sea. The only flightless cormorant, a bird that dives for fish. The only penguin that lives north of the Equator. The Galapagos Islands host natural wonders - and my wife Ruth and I were thrilled to travel there!

This was our second trip with Road Scholar, a nonprofit that offers travel for seniors with expert guides. On Friday, January 24, our group of 16 people flew from Quito, Ecuador to Baltra Island, roughly 600 miles west over the Pacific Ocean from the mainland. There, we boarded our double-hulled catamaran.

The catamaran carried two zodiacs, inflatable rectangular boats. That afternoon, we made our first wet landing, which meant dropping from the zodiac into shallow water and walking to land. It required water shoes for the stones under the water, and other shoes for hiking.

The Galapagos archipelago has 13 major islands. People live on four of them and occupy only three percent of the land. The other 97 percent is a national park surrounded by a marine reserve.

In seven days, we visited eight islands. We rode zodiacs around islands and into mangrove inlets. We snorkeled among fish, flightless cormorants, sharks, sea turtles, and Galapagos penguins. We saw blue-footed boobies, Nazca boobies, Galapagos sea lions, Galapagos hawks, Galapagos shearwaters, Galapagos giant tortoises, brown noddies, red phalaropes, brown pelicans, striated herons, yellow warblers, least sandpipers, wandering tattlers, Galapagos doves, American flamingoes, marine iguanas, land iguanas, flying fish, Munk's Pygmy Devil Rays, Sally Lightfoot crabs, barnacles, whimbrels, magnificent frigatebirds, red-billed tropicbirds, and finches.

Thirteen species of finches live in the Galapagos Islands. Charles Darwin spent five weeks in the Islands in 1835. The differentiation of the finches from island to island impressed him, and his observations fed his theory of evolution.

One bird won a special place in my heart. I was carrying a camera with a telephoto lens that ends in a tubular hood roughly four inches deep. Again and again, a Galapagos flycatcher, a small brown bird with yellow on its belly, landed on, perched in, and took off from the hood!

When Ruth and I returned to D.C., I downloaded 29,493 photos from our trip. To see the 160 photos that I selected from that download, please check this Google Photos album.

Here are just a few of David's fantastic photos from the Galapagos.
We highly recommend visiting his Google Photos album to see more!
- Stephanie, Heather & Leslie

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