Oh the Places I'll Go

 Scott and I recently returned from an expedition to the Canadian Arctic and Greenland.  Throughout, we found ourselves remembering our previous expedition to the other pole, Antarctica.  Several friends have indicated they wanted to read about our Arctic trip, which caused me to realize that I hadn’t written about the expedition we took to Antarctica in December, 2018.  So, this blog reports on both of those trips. Antarctica Expedition Map Greenland and Canadian Arctic Expedition Map Both of our polar expeditions were on small ice-rated expedition ships that carried between 150 and 200 passengers.  We booked our Antarctica expedition through Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT) which sailed on a Quark ship, the Ocean Diamond.  It was an older ship, serviceable, but definitely not luxurious.   Quark's Ocean Diamond The trip north was on a new luxury expedition ship, built during the Covid pandemic by Crystal Cruises.  When that company went bankr...

Me in 1970 standing outside the train at a Norwegian train station              I first visited Norway in the fall of 1970 when, like many young people of the time, my friend Cecelia and I went to Europe on a three-month post-college-graduation adventure.   We visited fourteen countries, sleeping in youth hostels, eating lots of bread and cheese, drinking wine, riding trains or hitchhiking, and marveling at the scenery, the people, and the cultures we experienced.   When asked what my favorite part of that trip was, Norway tops the list.   Cecelia and I enjoyed Oslo, but the real highlight of our time in Norway was riding the train from Oslo to Bergen and back to Oslo—a sixteen-hour roundtrip.   We spent nearly all of those hours (at least as long as daylight lasted) glued to the windows of the train, awed by the magnificent mountains, interlaced with fjords (fingers of water), and by the small villages scattered on mountainsides. ...