It All Depends on Your Point of View

Getting to Antarctica today. Yesterday we took a Zodiac ride around Elephant Island, the place where Ernest Shackleton’s crew took refuge for the 4 months or so it took for Shackleton and Worsley to navigate a lifeboat 800 miles in some of the roughest seas on earth to get help (If you have not read the book, Endurance” or seen the Shackleton movie, it’s an amazing true story of grit and cohesion and survival.

In fact, both William Shatner and the astronaut Scott Kelly said that it felt like a religious experience being there, seeing the exact spot from which these guys endured. And, in their talk, they each made the point that even though Shackleton’s mission was a failure, his ability to adapt to reality (their ship first got stuck in the ice/then crushed) and change “the plan”, from “being the first to traverse the entire Antarctic continent”, to now, finding a way of getting all 28 men back to England alive. Incredible story of heroism and leadership.

We have already seen penguins (we’ll see LOTS of penguins), seals, and a few whales, and we’re just getting to Antarctica. And we saw (and heard—like thunder) a glacier “calving” yesterday, where the ice breaks off and falls into the ocean, loudly, and creates what we are seeing hundreds of already, icebergs. Took some pics of them this am from our ship. And you’ll notice that even though it is only 5 am, it is light. No darkness in Antarctica at this time of year, their summer.

And, it struck me as funny, that down here, in the God-forsaken place at the bottom of the world, the temperature was 29 degrees Fahrenheit while back home in Erie, it was 24 hahahahaha.