Arrived at Palmer Station

September 28, 2009
Greetings to my dear family and friends!!!

So I finally arrived at Palmer Station Antarctica.. It was a long journey. 15 day's-11 day crossing and 6 of those days in the Drake.... But we saw some beautiful, beautiful things, got a lot of Science done and bonded as a Summer Crew. The last being most important. I count it such a blessing that 3/4 of our Summer crew is down at Palmer Station and it is FANTASTIC!. We have 5 FNG's (Pronounced=Fingees) New people to the program :) And they are hooked. One guy actually left a "REAL" job as an Engineer to come down. Of course he is 25 years old, so... "NO Problem" as he says... I can just go back and get another job... Yeah right... I said that 7 years ago.

We are having a long port call/change over. Six days. Enough to get to know the Winter crew and hear stories of what their time held for them. Eric, the Winter cook, is great. Gental Giant they call him. He is about 6'3 and 240... And he LOVES food. It's so fun to cook along side of him and we chat and laugh and put out some fun food for station. We are having a "Fancy-Dancy" end of season, sit down, meal on Tuesday. We are going all out. Once we decide on the menu (yeah... I know it's tomorrow...we want to allow for our creative juices to flow ) teee heee  heee. I'll send pics.

Have been still living on the boat. Tomorrow we change over ( winter crew moves onto ship/ Summer crew moves onto station) I can not tell you  how excited I will be to get off this ship. I don't get sea sick ... but boy do I go stir crazy. I want solid ground under my feet. Guess I will never be a "ship cook". There is still lots of snow and ice on the ground. I am guessing it will be about 3-4 weeks before I can get my tent up. But no worries. I am still planning on sleeping in my tent. Have to add to my current 13 months of sleeping outside in Antarctica! :)

There is a baby Elephant Seal out at Bonaparte Point, a group of us are heading out this afternoon to see if we can find it.(If the wind's die down..they have been at about 30knots all night???) I have put some photos of the crossing up and "Cross-Town Pizza" ( we,Palmer Station, invite the boat and everyone over to eat pizza on station and then have a big party up in the bar-It's a lot of pizza, this year we had some wonderful volunteers from the ship come and help out. What fun, I made Chocolate Martini's as a "THANK YOU" .)

I will write more later. Everything is in kind of a daze and confusing right now... give me a couple of days to get settled and I'll upload some more pictures. I also did a brief video picture of the journey South on Youtube. I had it perfectly timed with "Southern Cross" and youtube will not let me use it due to "legal stuff" ect... so they assigned some random song... but most of the photo's are on flickr... ( sorry...long explanation...I need to go outside :)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8448893@N05/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwg8GCnjn4E

Thank you again my dear friends for letting me share this with you. 

As ALWAYS.... I LOVE to hear how life is for you... what FALL ( my favorite time of year) is holding for you and your family? What fun things you are doing ect ect....

let me know.

hugs

stace

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” - Jack Kerouac

September 12th, 2009

Well it seems the time has come once again for me to pack my suitcase and hit the road. I sit in my hotel room in Denver after several days of training in the Raytheon office, watching Anthony Bordanies "No Reservations" and thinking.... "Why did I pack so much?" But isn't that always the case? One would think that after doing this for so many years I would have it down. Not the case. Ooops!

I am not sure what this blog is going to look like. Should it deal with my travel and experiences? Or cooking and recipes? Or both? I have had so many people tell me that I need to do a blog that I finally decided to give it a try. I am not much of a writer, but I will try my best to share with y'all what I am experiencing during my time at Palmer Station, Antarctica and the amazing things I get to experience. Any suggestions I welcome with an open heart. I want to try and transport you to the place that I am. :)

We depart Denver Sunday morning, fly to Dallas and then on to Punta Arena's Chile. We will board the LMG http://www.nsf.gov/od/opp/support/gould.jsp and begin our eleven day cruise south. A normal cruise is only five days, however there is a science group that will be doing water sampling at different depths throughout the Drake Passage.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Passage It will give us all a nice long ride to get to know each other. Hopefully it will be good weather. My crew that I will be working with seems great. We have a couple of people that have not gone to the Ice before and that is always fun. It is fun to be near them when they see their first iceberg. Or when they glimps the first sight of the station. I still get butterflies when we turn that corner and you can see just a glimps of it. Makes me smile just to think of it.