a long day...

This morning began with a very loud ringing of the phone waking myself and my roommate, Sally. It was just before 7am (in Ushuaia - but more like 2am in Los Angeles) and Michael was calling to see if I was awake. Hah!

I don't know how the morning past so quickly, but helping to organize the registration of all the participants and handing out of all the trip goodies (jackets, t-shirts, pin, patches, stickers, and who knows what else was in their packets!)

I made two trips to the stationary store for photocopies, pens, labels, etc... all the little, but important things required to organize an expedition of almost 60 people.

People are divided into 6 teams: alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, and foxtrot. The first three teams are dive teams, delta is made up of some divers and some non-divers and echo and foxtrot are non-divers. I'm in delta.

You should check out the passengers on the website under "The Explorers".

My jobs (so far) are to assist with uploading blogs to the website via iridium (satellite) phone (with help from Jorgen), and to collect the survey forms from everyone, every night. The forms are to collect data on what animals we see each day. This information will probably be included in the blog each day, too, that will be written by Wendy. If I can get it done in time. Another of my jobs will be to take questions posted to the website to the scientist and get answers and post them on the blog.

We should be able to post one blog per day, but we'll see how the phone treats us - and the weather.

We will board tomorrow afternoon around 4pm, but check out at most hotels is at 10am, so there will be piles of luggage in the lobby at the Cesar Hotel who is letting us use their restaurant as a staging area tomorrow. We should get underway tomorrow around 6pm... then hit the Drakes passage around 1am on saturday morning.

The plan is about 2.5 days of travel to the penninsula. To keep people occupied, there is a pool (like for football) to see when the first iceberg is spotted. There was also some talk about soccer, but I'm not sure if that actually means playing soccer on deck or what?!

This will probably be my last live personal blog entry for this trip because if we are using iridium phone, it will take for ever just to upload to the main blog (nevermind the expense!), so check out the main blog, www.elysiumepic.org and it is the second link down in the menu on the left.

Sorry, no photos for today, but I'll include one from yesterday.