Our trip from UAB to Antarctica begins at the Birmingham Airport. Although we have had much of our scientific equipment shipped down to Antarctica already we will still be loaded down with a number of things, such as our diving gear that we needed here for training, as well as other things that we need so desperately for our work that we wanted to carry them ourselves. So, most of us will have two or three "excess" bags in addition to our two personal bags of clothing and other things.

This time, the five different field team members from UAB will be leaving Birmingham on four different days. I'll leave first. From Birmingham I'll fly to Dallas. The longest leg of our flights down is next: nearly 10 hours to Santiago, the capital city of Chile.

My flight will arrive about 9 a.m., and I'll be met by agents contracted by the National Science Foundation (NSF) who will help me collect my bags. Normally we just change planes in Santiago and continue on. However, I'm going to spend a day in Santiago consulting with colleagues at Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, so the agent will take me to a hotel near the university.

The next morning, the agents will pick me up and take me back to the airport. There I'll meet Maggie and Kevin. They are leaving from Birmingham on the same flights as me but one day later. Together we will board our next plane. That will take us to the Chilean port city of Punta Arenas on the Straits of Magellan. There we will be met by another agent who will take us to our hotel for a much needed and hopefully long night's sleep.

If all goes well, when we get to Punta Arenas it will have been about 24 hours since Maggie and Kevin got on the plane in Birmingham.

Southern Chile is a wonderful area of the world, and so Maggie, Kevin, and I are going to be taking advantage of that with three days of vacation. The day after we arrive in Punta Arenas we will rent a car and drive about six hours over unpaved roads to a spectacular national park called Torres del Paine. I've never been able to go there but Maggie calls it the "Yosemite of Chile."

After our short vacation, we'll head back to Punta Arenas where we'll meet up with Katrin. She'll have taken the same path down as the rest of us but a few days later. Bill and his new USF graduate student, Chris, should arrive with Katrin.

In Punta Arenas we'll spend a day getting our special Antarctic clothing from the NSF contractor and loading ourselves and our gear on board the ARSV (Antarctic Research and Supply Vessel) Laurence M. Gould. That is the NSF's research ship that will take us to Palmer Station.

Although schedules can change at any time, right now we are slated to sail to Antarctica on 26 October. Coincidentally, that is 87 years to the day after Ernest Shackleton and his crew left Buenos Aires on the Endurance for their ill fated attempt to traverse the continent of Antarctica.

That expedition is recreated in the IMAX film Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure, which will be showing at the McWane Center in Birmingham from 23 November through 22 March.

The film is part of a larger exhibit that includes Antarctic photographs from our UAB group's previous expeditions as well as examples of things like the tents, boats, and extreme cold weather clothes we use when Antarctica.

There is also a hands-on science experiment on the adaptations of Antarctic organisms to their extreme environment called the X-Philes lab that is being presented by the UAB Center for Community Outreach and Development (CORD).

More information about the entire McWane exhibit is available by clicking on their link on our expedition main page.

Once the four of us from UAB and the two from USF set sail from Punta Arenas, it will be a four day cruise on the Gould across the Drake Passage to the station. Although it can be quite flat and calm, the Drake Passage does have the reputation of being the roughest part of the world's oceans. On my very first crossing to Palmer in 1985, we had 50 foot seas much of the way. So, it could be a "fun" trip.

The last member of our team to arrive at Palmer will be Jim. He'll come about two weeks later and will follow the same path as the rest of us from UAB had taken. The one exception is that he'll sail across the Drake on the other NSF Antarctic research ship, the RVIB (Research Vessel Ice Breaker) Nathaniel B. Palmer.

Although we probably will not be able to receive messages until we get to Palmer Station, we hope to be able to send messages from the ship. On our first opportunity we will let you know how the journey is going.

Expedition Journal Entries by Charles Amsler, Ph.D.:

Taking the Ocean's Temperature
Posted on 10/30/2001 at 3:30 p.m.

Getting There by Air and by Sea
Posted on 10/20/2001 at 11:30 a.m.

Getting Ready
Posted on 10/19/2001 at 8:00 a.m.