Day3- Buenos AIres

Dec 5, 2009

We are in BA and all of our luggage is too!! We arrived on time after a 10 hour flight. Managed to get about 4 hours of sleep on the plane, but our seats were right in front of a toilet and so we could hear those quiet flushes all night long.
We had a few moments worry when there seemed to be no new bags on the carousel and ours were not there yet. Fortunately they started putting more out and our bags were there, right next to each other! Made it through customs, everyone's luggage gets x-rayed? Then out the door to find our driver. Again, no problem! Andrea, the bilingual guide was there to meet us and take us to our car. There was not a lot for her to do as we were in a bit of a brainfog, but we will get to see her again tomorrow when we go to an Estancia.
Traffic was good and we were at our hotel within a half hour. We are staying at the Savoy Golden Tulip or Golden Tulip Savoy. The room is great, plenty of space for us and wonder of wonders- in room WIFI. The room was ready, so we were able to check in at 9:30 AM. Linnea is asleep beside me and I am going to try and nap as well.
The iPhone alarm is set to wake us up at 12 so we can have lunch before we go on a tour of the city.
I will report back here later, hopefully with photos!

After a nice lunch in the hotel restaurant, we headed out on our City Tour. There were 5 other Americans on our tour including one couple who was just finishing 25 days of travel in South America and a family of three who also just arrived this AM.
Since we had decided not to bring our umbrellas, it decided to rain pretty hard at the first place we stopped! Our guide, Lucia, was a wealth of historical information and we saw the pink palace, the Camenita, the Recoleta, and several different parts of the city.
Buenos Aires reminds my partly of a European city- lots of big apartment blocks, main streets filled with shops. It also reminds me of Mexico- the poorer parts of town are just kind of cobbled together in a hodge podge way. I was not able to get any pictures of the poorer parts of town, we seemed to just pass them on our way elsewhere.
Two interesting stops were the Camenita, a colorful area where artists hang out and the Recoleta, a graveyard. The Camenita is interesting because the tradition of the houses being colorful comes from when the area was a port area. The people would paint their houses with the left over paint from painting the ships.
The Recoleta was a city of the dead. It is filled with crypts and vaults and cats! Many of the crypts you could peek into and it was very interesting. Some were well cared for, some looked like they had not seen a human hand in years, make that generations.
We enjoyed our day but we are tired, now we have to try and stay awake until

Day 2- TRAAAVVVVEEEEELLL........

Dec 4, 2009

Well, this morning went a bit better at Holiday Inn Express! Kudos to Sam, who got us on the shuttle from the property next door and even OFFERED to call and cancel our cab!! Sam should be at the desk all the time, I suppose that might get old for him.
PDX apparently was sending thousands out into the world this morning. There were huge lines for security, but they had everything up and going so it went pretty quick!
Got on board to find we have some awesome inflight attendants, sense of humor and easy smiles! They were tested too! After loading a very full flight, we headed out to the runway only to return to the gate for a faulty sensor and more fuel. Can you say 2 hour delay? I can and it sounds like FREE inflight movies!!( the only reason I can be so happy is that we had a 5 hour layover!)
All is good now, buying our food as I type, at least they have some good choices this time! I will soon be finishing the movie Post Grad, pretty good so far. Linnea will be stealing the computer, she has been chomping at the bit since I got the wifi!
We will have a 3 hour layover in Atlanta, then it is a 10 hour overnight flight to Buenos AIres. Still have to go deal with seat assignment in Atlanta.
Good news, I just heard from Quark Expeditions, they are going to let us be their official blogger from our cruise! Good thing, since they do not have true internet hook up and I do not think we will be on Facebook once we are on board next week. So if you want to see what we are up to, go to quarkexpeditions.com and click on blogs. Ours will be Antarctic Adventure- Dec 10-21, Ocean Nova! No pics, will have to add them when we return.
We are having a good time so far!!

Departure- At Last!

December 3rd- Day One of our Adventure!

Well, after a frantic morning and early afternoon of packing and organizing things, Linnea and I made it to Portland. There were a few hiccups along the way, hopefully not a sign of what is to come for the next two weeks!!
For some reason most of the rental cars where we liver were unavailable today, but thanks to my dad for calling around to all the places and getting a car lined up for us!
It is crazy when the family calendar, aka Me, tries to leave town! I seemed to spend the day saying, " and then someone has to do this or someone has to do that!" Hopefully they will survive without us!
Got the bags packed, but still have a sneaky suspicion that I have forgotten something. The drive was uneventful, thank goodness! We stopped for dinner in Hood River at 6th St Bistro, yum. Made it to the airport and dropped off the rental car no problem. Then we ran into a mixup with the information booth, I think they called the right shuttle, but the guy who was standing there told us to get on the wrong shuttle :(. Even after I said we were to go to Airport Way, not Columbia. The shuttle driver was very nice and took us to the right place after he dropped off his proper customers!
We are staying at the Holiday Inn Express and I booked it for the free airport shuttle. When I called, I asked if I could book the shuttle that we wanted and was assured that it would be no problem to do it when I checked in. Well, when we checked in the shuttle we wanted was full! They very kindly offered to get me onto the sister property's 4 AM shuttle- I was hoping to sleep til 4AM! So taxi it is for us!
Tried to do online checkin only to find that the seats the airline has for us are totally different from our tickets. So tomorrow in Atlanta, I have to wait for the gate agent to try and get seats for us together> wish us luck with that!! It is a long flight!
Still, thanking God for giving me a wonderful daughter to travel with! Hoping tomorrow goes a bit more smoothly!!

What to Bring?!

The packing process had me in a bit of a tizzy. We were going to be leaving the Northwest in the dead of winter and arriving in Buenos Aires in summer then heading to Ushuaia and Antarctica both in late spring, early summer.

In the end, we tried to keep it simple. For travel, comfy clothes that were warm yet light enough to not be intolerable if it was hot when we arrived in BA. A couple of outfits for warm weather for our time in the middle of South America. We figured we could make things work for a few wearings each.

For the far south, we brought a few long sleeved tops each as well as a couple of pairs of jeans each. Again, we planned on using things a couple of times each and also planned on using hotel laundry in Ushuaia. We each had our Arcteryx shells from skiing. These shells are great because they are gore-tex along with being super wind resistant and light weight!!

For the far, far south we planned on using the above as well as each adding one pair of fleece pants , two sets of long underwear, four pair ski socks, balaclava, neck gaiter, two pairs of gloves/mittens, two pairs of glove liners, ski hat, and sunglasses. I also brought along a waterproof backpack to use wherever needed.

Quark was going to give us a removable, fleece lined parka and they would be letting us use rubber boots for the expedition. This saved space on the way, but we did have to leave space so that we could add the parka on the return journey.

That covers the clothes..... on the techie side I brought my computer(Mac Book :). I knew I would be taking many, many pictures and wanted to be able to download and back them up. This came in handy as I was able to weed out pics daily and I was able to start organizing them in iPhoto daily. For this task, I also brought along a card reader and two 16 gig flash drives. (The flash drives were for my second back up...did not want to lose these pics!) I made sure I had a couple of 8 gig memory cards for my camera too. These were cards that were meant to be able to take video, so I knew they would be pretty fast on the storing of photos. This came in handy as I took multiple pics of penguin rear ends and empty water while trying to get that elusive photo of the penguin flying through the air while porpoising through the water!!

A last minute tech purchase was a Kindle. I am an avid reader and the thought of leaving for 17 days without 17 books is difficult for me. I had no idea how much reading time I would or would not have. Having 17 books in my luggage was just not going to fit with my plans to have clothing with me on the trip. I also have a hard time throwing out books, so I knew I would have a hard time fitting in souvenirs if I bought them! With the Kindle, I was able to load up 10 books before I left. The Kindle, also pretty slim and light weight, fit easily into the carry on luggage. We also managed to add a few books while in BA, waiting for our flight to Ushuaia.

One of the most important packing items, besides all the various charging cables, was a power strip. This way we could charge multiple electronics all at the same time and with one converter!

Things I wish we had packed? Ski goggles- sunglasses did not do it for protecting the eyes from blowing snow and sleet. There were several times I was kicking myself for not bringing them along. They would have been ideal for stopping the snow as well as being good in low light conditions.

Dishwashing gloves- I had read that these worked great as waterproof gloves, but just could not picture it for some reason. Trust me, they work well. Most of the expedition team were using them for zodiac purposes. The kayakers also seemed to be using them as well. I am thinking buy large and you should have no trouble fitting glove liners underneath. They are lightweight and easily moved into a pack for storage while on land.

Much of the time, I was just wearing glove liners while on land. The only times we had problems with cold hands was while we were doing zodiac cruises, sitting for an hour or two does not stir the blood!

Finally, sunscreen and anti mosquito spray were packed as well. Sunscreen was handy for most of the trip. The mosquito spray came in handy for BA and Iguazu~

Antarctica Here We Come!!

We just finished the trip of a lifetime! I have kept track of what we did in a couple of different places and now I am going to try and bring it all together!

Christmas 2008 found the family enjoying a great ski trip and when we returned home, I started getting the bug to go see Antarctica. We started looking at videos on Youtube and started searching the old favorites, Cruisecritic.com and Tripadvisor.com for ideas on how to get our feet onto the continent of Antarctica.

After viewing videos of the Drake Passage, the potential travelers were down to three of us and I contacted Quark Expeditions to see about booking a trip with them. They seemed to be the experts in polar travel, with multiple ships and itineraries to choose from.

This process brought us to March. At this point our travel crew dropped to two, my daughter and I. ( Our third traveler had decided to go to snowboard camp instead.) This was when we finalized our booking on Quark's Ocean Nova for December 10-21, 2009.

Through the summer, we continued to search the internet for information about the Antarctic and what we would need to bring with us on our expedition.

Over the summer, I upgraded my camera to a Nikon D90. I wanted to be able to take video without putting one camera away and taking another one out! It was far more efficient to be able to just press a few buttons and switch between stills and video. Another purchase that seemed to be needed when we added Iguazu Falls to our itinerary, was a waterproof camera. Olympus Stylus Tough seemed to do the trick, especially attractive when the salesman pointed out that it was built to withstand drops of up to six feet!

Also, as we looked into travel to the end of the earth, we added some stops to our itinerary. It was decided to spend two nights in Buenos Aires to deal with travel fatigue and any possibly lagging luggage. On Trip Advisor, I also started reading about Iguazu Falls - a seemingly amazing natural wonder of the world that I had never heard of. Two more nights were added to go explore Iguazu.

Booking airfare seemed a bit of a puzzle, so I ended up booking through Quark's airdesk. That seemed to work well, most of the airport fees were taken care of which saved us stops while passing through the Argentinian air terminals. ( we did have to pay the exit tax at Ushuaia, but it was quite easy to do.) We also had a number that we could call in case of any problems while flying, which made me feel more comfortable as I would be traveling alone with my daughter.(Fortunately, I never had to avail myself of this help desk, so no idea how they worked!)

Finally, as the departure date approached, I used Quark's airdesk to book a few tours and transfers for the journey. A scramble in November to make sure all was paid for and then it was just a matter of waiting for December 3rd to arrive and figuring out what to pack!