Another Trip - Another Continent - Nov. 9, 2019

Every year about this time we take an overseas trip and this year is no exception. Our bucket list gets smaller and smaller every year and this year we are going to cross off the biggest bucket on our list. Our last continent, Antarctica.

As you can see from the picture Linda is going to be missing her backyard. She's planted onions and beets, both of which are up, and three tomato plants. She's even instructed a neighbor on when to come and put protective covering over the tomatoes in case of temperatures in the low 30's. I wasn't surprised to see the beginnings of a tear in her eye as she turned away from something she really loves. It is no wonder that she is such a special person.

All packed up and ready to go. We're taking a bigger suitcase along this time because of the fact that after three weeks in cold weather we will be spending a week in Florida, so we will need close for each. The small suitcase is full of our cold weather close, and I do mean full of. Anything that could be packed in a space bag and suck down to virtually nothing has been done. Roger and Diane are once again giving us a ride to the airport. They are always on time and I always seem to be just a minute or two late, but wonder of wonders this year I was actually ready on time. The best part of that is that it made Linda a very happy camper.

Obligatory selfie.

One of the reasons why I always get a window seat.

 Our flight to Santiago, Chile leaves from Miami tomorrow night but Ms. Doesn't Want to Take a Chance at Missing the Flight, decreed that we would go into Miami a day early. While our flights to Chile are on Delta Airlines, we're on our own getting to Miami and so we're flying American. It has to be one of the worst run Airlines. We were delayed leaving Dallas for almost an hour while they waited on the baggage for some late arriving passengers. I guess there philosophy is to inconvenience over 200 passengers for the convenience of a handful. Then when we got to Miami it took forever for our baggage to arrive. Oh,  another thing, on the air trans getting from one terminal to another at Dallas the few seats were all occupied by American employees.

We're staying at the Sheraton right at the entrance to the airport and the main reason we picked it was because it has a shuttle bus that runs every 20 minutes 24 hours a day which will come in handy tomorrow afternoon when we had back to the airport after spending the day sightseeing in Miami. I'll just say that waiting in large crowds seems to be the norm at Miami airport. They other thing was the unbelievably long walk from our gate to the baggage claim area with some of the moving sidewalks not working. We look at the good side of all this, the trip has only got to get better, which hopefully means no two days of Linda being seasick when we traverse the Drake Passage in a few days.

Our ship is going to be the MS Roald Amundsen and one of the bad things is that there is likely to be no Internet that will accommodate posting the blog during much of the voyage. But that doesn't mean that avid readers, or maybe it's reader if there is one, will be without knowing where we are. The ship takes a photo every 10 minutes during the day and I guess night since the sun hardly sets that far south now, and posts it on the Internet. The photo below was taken just a few days ago and it shows a group of people from the ship walking up a snow-covered slope, and you can see the zodiac heading back out to the ship on the water. Here is the link to the website where the photos are posted. You can either click the word here in the previous sentence or paste the url below in your browser and then follow along on our voyage. The ship now returning to Punta Arenas to pick us up on Tuesday morning.

https://hurtigruten.panomax.com/ms-roald-amundsen