3 Days Away

 21-Jan-2023 8:00pm
Friends and colleagues encouraged me to keep and post a log of my upcoming trip. I'll do my best. So here goes.

It still hasn't sunk in that this trip, first conceived over two years ago, is three days away from becoming reality. Almost exactly 72 hours from now, I'm scheduled to board a flight in Miami, which originates in Chicago with my daughter Mel and her roommate Colleen aboard, bound for Buenos Aires. From there, we have several hours to find our way to a smaller airport across town for a three hour flight from Buenos Aires to Ushuia, at the southern tip of Argentina.

After two nights in Ushuia, we should be recovered enough to board our ship, the Quark Ocean Adventurer, for the roughly two day voyage over the unpredictable Drake Passage to the Antarctic Peninsula.

Mel knew I had an interest in Antarctica because of one of my hobbies, polar philately. When she was in high school (maybe junior high) we watched a movie together called "Shackleton". It documented the incredible story of Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1917. I suspected it gave Mel some interest in the Antarctic, a place that had interested me since my early teens, but never thought about actually going to.

In 2020, we exchanged a few links to varying Antarctic tours. I never thought we were serious. Mel mentioned the possibility of going there to her roommate Colleen, who has a goal of visiting all seven continents. Colleen appears to have seen this as an opportunity to visit the most difficult continent to get to, and got more serious about investigating tours.

Colleen arranged to have a travel agent present various Antarctic tour options to the three of us in early 2022. We ultimately selected a Quark expedition leaving in late January, 2023. A little bit of reality slipped in when we started having to plunk down some serious money for the trip. The payment to Quark got us from Ushuia to Antarctica and back, but how to get to Ushuia and back was up to us.

In the following months, we figured out how we were going to get to Ushuia and back, and where we'd overnight if needed. What's left for me now in the next three days is to review the packing list, and make sure I have all the outer, middle, and inner protective layers needed. I'm anticipating a lot of sleep deprivation -- all night air flights, and not much darkness that far south in the winter.  

Looking forward to the trip. And looking forward to being back.