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Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Catching up

We are Thankful.






We decided that we would take a ship through the fjords of Southern Chile in the Patagonia region. The ship is a freighter that has been augmented to accomodate passengers as well. We met wonderful people and had a very good time. The weather was fair, but it was fun watching the ship navigate the narrow channels as we sailed south. That is until the last night. At about 3 AM Andy and I were awakened by a very loud crunch, not once but twice. We had a couple of glassses on the desk which crashed to the floor as well as our suitcases and anything that wasn't nailed down. Over the loud speaker we were requested to come to the top deck warmly dressed with our life vests. I got hung-up on the warmly dressed and took too long a time but fortunately we did not have to abandon ship. We were informed the next morning that the ship hit an island.
How? We will never know but we suspect that someone was asleep at the wheel or not at the wheel. Later we heard things like "if we hit 2 feet higher it would have been a disaster." We also heard that there were 60,000 lbs of plastic explosives on board. We don't know if those things are true but as I said earlier, we are thankful!

Friday, February 11, 2011

We're in Punta Arenas Chile

We're in Punta Arenas, Chile. It's at the bottom of the South American continent at a latitude of 53° 10'. That's as far south as Edmonton, Alb Canada is north. (Sacramento is 38° 35'.) We came from Puerto Natales  to look at penguins and yesterday we found a colony of about 60,000 pairs. There's so cute.

All is well.