By the time we anchored near Danco Island in the Gerlache Strait on January 12th, we had been on the ship for four days straight. We were itching to move after a series of cancelled landings. The steady hum of the ship had started to seep into our bones and we had become accustomed to occasional rocking of the world beneath our feet. On Danco Island, we were promised a hike.

Last week I had an article published in UNC Magazine about our experience on Danco Island, so if you’d like to read the details, please follow this link to the online version of the article. Below are some photos and bits of the story that were not published.

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I haven’t posted in awhile – but don’t think I’m done with Antarctica! This is simply what happens in March and April. This time of the year is the equivalent of Christmas holidays in the academic world. There’s a race to wrap-up old work, the year-end meetings, reference letters, student advising, drafts of papers to read. And, at the same time, the weather is shifting: color returns to the world as the grass becomes green and tulips push their way up through piles of autumn leaves that still litter the backyard. There are warm days that pull me outdoors for long-awaited bike rides, followed immediately by two inches of snow and brief returns to winter.

With this post, I want to carry you with me down the icy waterway of memory lane, and share some of my favorite photos of our meanderings along the Antarctic Peninsula.

Our zodiac took a brief tour through some very icy waters in Flandres Bay along the Antarctic Peninsula.

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How often do you lose track of what happened between leaving home and arriving somewhere else? Or, how often are you aware of the space that encompasses that moment between one year and the next? Or that space between breathing in and breathing out again? Today, I’m fascinated by those spaces in between, those spaces of transition. In part, that’s because I feel like I’m still in that space right now. That space between my journey with Homeward Bound in Antarctica and my gradual transition back to daily life in Colorado and my work as a professor.

I have so much to share with you over the next few weeks. In some ways, visiting Antarctica gives you a sense of what it must feel like to visit another planet. I have penguin and iceberg photos galore – stories of shipboard life, new friends and experiences, our work in understanding each other and ourselves. But every journey has those ‘in-between’ spaces at the beginning and at the end. It’s in that space where you shed something from your old life and take on something new – often, without fully being aware of what’s happening.

Pre-Drake Crossing in Ushuaia: Before the in-between time is the excitement and anticipation of things that will happen after the in-between time (and some trepidation about what the in-between time will bring).

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