I travelled to Iceland with my 16-year-old twins just last month. I did a lot of research, and decided to rent a car and do a nine-day self-driving tour, staying at various guest houses, hotels and cottages along the way. We went to many of the usual sites that tourists often visit .
.. the Blue Lagoon, the Golden Circle, and the gorgeous glacier lagoons with turquoise blue icebergs.
But the highlight of our trip was our visit to the island of in the stunning Westman Islands, a 45-minute ferry ride off the south coast, home to one of the top 100 golf courses and the largest puffin colony in the world. While it was already very cool to see puffins in the wild, we were also lucky enough to be there during ‘puffling season.’ What is that, you ask? Pufllings are young puffins, and once they are sufficiently grown, their parents take off and return to their life at sea, leaving the pufflings behind in the hillside burrows.
When a puffling is ready, it also takes off to sea on its own. However, on the Westman Islands, some of the pufflings get disoriented by the town lights, mistaking them for the moon and stars, and crash land in and around the town at night. For about three weeks each August, the townspeople go out after dark with their flashlights and cardboard boxes, looking for lost little pufflings to rescue.
The townspeople place the fluffy birds in boxes and keep them at their homes overnight, then release them off the cliff at the edge of town in the morning. I had read.
