Random Bits, Antarctic November 2023

As I try to finish up with stuff from the Antarctic trip, I have a bunch of little random things that I wanted to share with you. They are in no particular order. Some of them are marked for specific people as when I travel some of my shadow travelers (people not able to travel but accompany me in spirit) have requested I look for specific things from them.

Going to the Antarctic was amazing, but in a world of amazing
this trip was something special.
We had unprecedented good luck, good weather, good seas.
We had a small, sturdy ship and a captain with adventure in his heart and a twinkle in his eye.
This wasn't the itinerary we signed up for.
It was so much more.

Other animals and plants:

Other than the whales, sea lions, and penguins, we saw very little other animals. And almost no plants.

The skua was one of the few birds we saw.

This was the only feather I saw on our hikes.

This tiny mollusk was shown to us by one of our naturalists
It attaches to a whale, up off the coast of South America.
Then it traveled all of the way down here to get
washed up on shore.

These patches of lichen smaller than a dollar bill
are centuries old.
Things grow slowly in the cold.

A rare patch of "grass"

Human contact:

The very few human things we saw were mostly about whaling.

This was on our first shore walk.
Touching is absolutely forbidden,
yet people wanted to go up and sit on it.
Our expedition team was fierce.

Deception Island.
A seal hunting site from 1818
then whaling station till 1931
Those huge tanks were for the rendered blubber.

Over that ridge there was a live steam vent.

To see the bits of whale bone in the gravel
was deeply saddening.

It is hard to express in photos
how very big everything is.

There is water, and ice, and some exposed rock.

Comments

Antarctic, Tuesday 14 November 2023

A week and a half after landing, and I am still processing this trip. I may be processing for the rest of my life. I think any trip to the Antarctic would be life changing. For me as a geographer, traveler, and elder, this trip was on my probably not gonna happen bucket list. Getting there was hard work. Getting over my personal barriers was difficult. There was nothing easy about getting there, a personal triumph. But there was something magical about this trip, this voyage. Even the Expedition leaders noted there was something special about it, a luck. The weather, the sea conditions, the sightings. All were way beyond expectations. I will begin as the voyage begins with Drake Passage. This passages has two settings one involves sea sick meds, learning how to wedge oneself into bed, how not to smash fingers in doors. The other is Drake Lake. There is nothing in between. We did the crossing in a day and a half rather than the usual two. There were bulletin boards with all sorts o

The Galapagos: The start

Dear Friends I am just back from a trip that will forever change my life. An apex experience. I am afraid I will be insufferable for a while. When you meet me in real time, I will try to not go on and on, but if you ask, I will be happy tell you about what we did. Note on the photos: I will note all of the photos taken by other people, the rest were from me, taken with my phone (or rather my camera with a phone in it.) I have reduced the size. If you want a full copy of one of them, contact me. Note on dates, locations, and species: I do not claim any accuracy. Where you find that I have erred, please let me know so I can correct. Because of the size of the experience, and the huge number of photos I am processing, I am going to break this down into several sections because it is just so enormous in my head. I will sent an email update when I post something new, or you can check back here as I will make the following into links as I do the posts. Quito: or how to get high, Th

CPAP while traveling, and how to feed them.

Th ere have been many questions about battery backup and camping issues in my communities. I have become almost expert out of desperation. Here is what I have learned. Note: I am not a medical technician, nor am I well versed in the magic of electronics. Use all this as suggestions of what kinds of questions you should be asking. No solution is perfect. Examine what it is you need. This will have a lot to do with what you need medically in terms of your machine. Just because they issued you a particular machine, this does not mean that is the best one for you either medically or to fit your life style. My life includes lots of travel, both in airplanes and in an RV. Travel Machines My machine of choice is the ResMed Mini. Insurance would not provide one for me. Even though it was less expensive than the one they wanted to foist on me. A friend who knows me well, and is a high end nurse. Oh yeah both her and her partner are CPAP users. I would love to test drive other machine

Bad Knees Travel,

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