Heidi and I got back from Alaska on Saturday, and while we'd usually have our journals up in a timely fashion, I don't think that's going to happen this year due to pesky things like jobs.  I'm sure Heidi will get her journals up at some point, and I might, too...right after Nicaragua's journals.  In the meantime, here's a quick review of Alaska, ( Read more... )

Since today is the day for sharing videos, I thought I should share a video from Nicaragua that I'd forgotten about.  The quality is better on my mac.com site and I can't seem to embed it here, so instead just click the link to see Heidi and her New Friend in Nicaragua.

“Good Morning, ladies and no gentlemen, Good Morning! It’s currently 9:30 am, the weather outside is rainy and breakfast is being served for another 25 minutes.”  Heidi’s wake-up call for us this morning was the second best the entire trip (it’s hard to beat Stephen’s voice, especially when he’s announcing exciting things about Antarctica).

The ( Read more... )

For some reason I didn't feel very good this morning, so it was especially hard to get out of bed when our alarm went off.  Breakfast was good, and Luis was right on time to take us on one last cab ride to the airport.  He talked the whole way about his plans to get ahead with the lessons he learned from a book called "Rich Man, Poor Man".  At ( Read more... )

This has been a vacation of early mornings.  Somehow we had the idea that we would sleep late this morning, but instead we were up at 7:15, getting ready for another day enjoying nature.

Luis our cab driver from yesterday was set to pick us up at 8:30, but thanks to his overly friendly dog with muddy paws, he was a few minutes late.  He drove us ( Read more... )

My alarm went off at 5:15 this morning.  I quietly tried to pack the last of my bags and get ready without waking Janine, but since the rule is the quieter you try to be in the morning the more noise you make, Janine woke up anyway.  After a quick and sleepy good-bye, I hauled all 4 of my bags downstairs.  I checked two of them with the bellman, ( Read more... )

Yesterday Mindy and I went to the ferry station to buy tickets for the ferry to Colonia, Uruguay, but were very disappointed to discover that our options were limited.  We'd heard it was a really cute town, so we eventually settled for a short trip and bought tickets on the early morning ferry there, and the early afternoon ferry back.  Our hopes ( Read more... )

We were sad to hear Stephen's voice waking us up this morning.  And it was strange that even though it wasn't terribly early, it was still dark outside!  We had a very uninspiring breakfast that was made more enjoyable by Dolder's glee at the size of the breakfast sausage.  "Look at the size of those things!"  I can't believe I didn't take a ( Read more... )

The waters were calmer this morning; there's still a bigger swell than our passage the other direction, but it's much less than yesterday.  There are less sick-looking people walking around, too, which is nice.  Breakfast was not until 8, and this time it was lovely to sleep in a little.  Our first lecture this morning was Bird Heidi's lecture on ( Read more... )

Last night was the longest night in the history of long nights.  The ship rolled all night, tossing things off the shelf in our room and sliding me from one edge of the bunk to the next.  The noise things were making and the pitching of the ship made it impossible for me to sleep well, and time crawled along.  My stomach was a little upset, but ( Read more... )