Our morning expedition begins with an excursion on Brown Base, an Argentine research base established on Paradise Bay on the Antarctica Peninsula.  About a dozen scientists live there throughout the year researching penguins and trying to identify unknown sea critters that live at the bottom depths of Antarctica’s frigid waters.  There are 4 simple red wooden buildings that don’t look like they could withstand the harsh snow and windstorms that Antarctica is known for.  This cove must be protected well from the elements.  

The base is surrounded by white, grey and blue beautiful mountains of the continental plate that emerged to form Antarctica. While our position has changed, the landscape continues to look similar giving us continuous views of beauty that seem unreal.  If there was a place that looked like heaven on Earth, it is Antarctica.  Kyle jokes that he now understands REM’s song from the 80’s that says “it’s the end of world and I feel fine” – he was obviously in Antarctica when he wrote that line. 

On the base the staff has set us a long and wickedly steep snow hike up to the top of the mountain.  The climb is long and arduous.  Leanne opts to hang out at the base as she doesn’t think her knee can handle. Corey, Justin and Ashlynn jack rabbit off ahead while Kyle and John hang together and take it more slowly. By the time we get to the top, Kyle is huffing and puffing something fierce.  “I sure hope the Inca Trail isn’t this tough,” Kyle comments worriedly. Little does he know what is in store for him.

This time, instead of being rewarded with just a 360 degree view, we are rewarded with a giant snow slide down. The kids whizz on down the slide while Kyle lingers a while to enjoy the views.  Kyle had hiked up with his backpack on so he has to hold it on his chest. He takes a running start and going flying downhill.  The only problem is that his jacket came up at the start so he is now flying over the snow and ice on his exposed lower back.  Fun but ouch, ouch and ouch as he says.

Justin and Ashlynn hike back up and go down the slide two more times.  By this point, John realizes that his sunglasses must have come out of his pocket on the slide down.  Justin offers to go back up and slide down slowly and look for them which he does but has no luck.  It’s now time to go get the Zodiac boat she we head out with a pretty bummed out John in tow. 

We stop at one of the red buildings where the Argentine researches will give you an Antarctica passport stamp.  Michael has warned us that it is not an official stamp and can cause problems when entering other countries.  Given the number of countries we still have left, we opt to get a stamp on one of their brochures.

Once again, we are the last ones to the boat loading and thus end up on the Zodiac of our now favorite guides Morgan and Sarah.  Leanne asks them if they can radio to the guides on the hill and ask them if they could be on the lookout for John’s sunglasses and case.  They tell us it’s a good thing we told them because that is considered littering so they will have to search for it.  Nothing better than having a team of motivated environmental guides trying to thwart the prospect of littering on Antarctica and sure enough the sunglasses are sitting in the lost and found when we return. 

On our Zodiac ride, we see a leopard seal, a humpback from afar and incredible blue striped glaciers exposing their ancient ice.  The Leopard Seal had a half-chewed up Penguin carcass next to him on the iceberg as he enjoyed a post-penguin lunch nap. We see a glacier calving which basically means the breaking of ice chunks from the edge of a glacier.  The hue in this port was particularly blue.  It seems colder than that it has been and Kyle is chilled to the bone.  Leanne will astutely point out when we get back to the room and change that Kyle’s base layers and under clothes are soaking wet from the strenuous hike so he was sitting there soaking wet on the Zodiac with the wind whipping about. We all are collectively so cold and tired that we don’t ask our normal volume of questions. We just enjoy the crisp chilly air around us as best we can. 

After chicken soup and hamburgers for lunch (a nod for the Americans onboard), we jointly decide to relax on the ship this afternoon and pass up the expedition on Neko Harbor.  We nap and Kyle tries to catch up on the blog which is woefully behind at this point.  We have also taken to watching David Attenborough’s nature documentaries that the ship broadcasts 24 x 7.  We are very excited when his documentary about the Artic and Antarctica comes on.

Our evening daily recap mini-lectures covered two great topics: penguin sounds and social media responsibility.  Sarah gives the talk on penguin acoustics.  We always love Sara and Morgan’s lectures.  Neil the Photographer gets up and gives a talk on being socially responsible on social media.  He launches into a diatribe on how there were 259 deaths last year from people taking selfies somewhere they shouldn’t have been and end up falling to their death.  Kyle is looking around for the woman who got yelled at for doing exactly that yesterday but can’t find her.  Presumably she is hiding under her table turning a bright shade of red.  Neil also brought up the Torres del Paine fires started by tourists which something we witnessed firsthand when we were there.

Dinner is buffet style and so doesn’t last as long as plated service as the kids mow through the food as soon as they sit down. Afterwards, we are on the balcony enjoying the night views when it starts to rain lightly.  After a few minutes, The Viking Overlord comes on the loudspeaker and announces that the camping trip has been cancelled due to unpredictable weather.  All that hullabaloo and fuss over the camping raffle and in the end, there is no camping trip.  We agree that it was better Corey and Justin didn’t get picked because they would have been more disappointed waiting all week and then having it be cancelled.