Our Journey Begins

Our Journey Begins

 

 

We are off to explore Antarctica!.   We cannot wait to return for just one night to Buenos Aires, Argentina to eat at our favorite restaurant (La Pecora Nera) and stay at our favorite hotel in Recoleta (Loi Suites).  Next, we go to Ushuaia, Argentina (tip of South America) for a few days before joining a Quark Expedition to Antarctica for 11 days.  

We will take a polar plunge into freezing Antarctic waters, camp for one night on the ice, walk among the penguins, seals and other native aquatic wildlife and hopefully see numerous whales.   

Getting to Antarctica requires crossing the Drake Passage, the body of water between the southern tip of South America and the Antarctic Peninsula.

The 500 miles wide passage between South America and the Antarctica Peninsula is the shortest crossing from Antarctica to the rest of the world's land. There is no significant land anywhere around the world at the latitudes of the Drake Passage.  This creates an unimpeded flow of current which carries a huge volume of water (about 600 times the flow of the Amazon) through the Passage and around Antarctica.  Our crossing, which will take 2 days each way, will either be named "The Drake Lake" if it is calm or "The Drake Shake" if it is choppy.  Either way it will be an adventure and we believe we are prepared with the appropriate seasickness remedies. We will end this wonderful vacation by thawing out in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for four days before returning home.

But, we are getting ahead of ourselves.  First, we cannot wait to get to Buenos Aires and meet up with our great friends and travel companions, Ralph and Donna Ainger.   We are meeting them for dinner tomorrow evening at La Pecora Nera.

Last year, we were in Argentina for two weeks and enjoyed keeping a Blog each day.  We plan to do that again this year with Antarctica but we may not have quite the level of access to the Internet that we did on the mainland.  We plan to try!

And away we go!