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 :)
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
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