"This is MY rock! I might wander over here....but then I'll come right back and proclaim "MY ROCK"!

Part II, gentoo penguin chick hounding Mom (or Dad) for food

Chinstrap penguins, practicing the art of the "double-hop".

I will never, ever tire of having this as the view from the dining room table.

At first glance, this might look like some sort of not-too-subtle effort at romance...but actually, it's a (nearly fully grown) chick, hounding its parent for some of that good, good regurgitated fish-stuff-in-the-throat. Mmmmm.

Gentoo penguin opera

Gentoo penguin, late for a job interview on the cruise ship. (sorry about wind noise - almost always windy in Antarctica!)

sheep dog in Peru. This is the most fun, ever.

Well, after 42 straight hours without sleep, and after three airports and three flights, we're back home. It was an adventure, although not quite the way we had planned. Three great weeks instead of eight, but at least we're home and I was a little nervous, for a while anyway, that we might get stranded somewhere indefinitely. Fortunately that was not the case, now to get to work on the next one! (whenever *that* may be.....)

We left Montevideo and sailed to Buenos Aires. Everyone will disembark within the next 18 hours, and make their ways home, as best they can. We have flights from Bueno Aires to Hawaii - through Panama City and San Francisco - but we are reading about 4-6 hour wait times at airport customs and checkpoints, so who knows if we’ll be able make it all work. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

Well, folks, you will have noticed a lull in the travel reporting. We were told yesterday morning that the remaining 5 weeks of the trip have been cancelled, and everyone will need to disembark in Montevideo, Uruguay today (Saturday), and make their plans to get home, which we frantically did. Now we have arrived in Montevideo, only to find that the government has closed the borders. No one can disembark. The Captain announced that he doesn’t know where we will sail to next, or when, but that the company is “working on it”. At this point, you know as much as I do.

Rumors are swirling on the ship, of course, about possible cancellations, of cruise itineraries themselves, shore excursions, etc. I’m currently listening to the Detroit Tiger spring training game, and the announcers are all but certain that spring training will be suspended after today. Lotta uncertainty, everywhere you look.

At Port Stanley in the Falklands, we made a trek out to a penguin colony - mostly Gentoos as we’ve seen in Antarctica, but also a small colony of King penguins (the ones with orange coloring on head and neck. Lots of fuzzy brown chicks. Also, some flightless Falkland steamer ducks.

The Drake Passage was, as it turned out, the “Drake Lake” - very smooth and we made good time. So we stopped at New island in the Falklands, alongside a vessel that wasn’t so lucky.

We have sailed away from our beloved Antarctica and headed across the Drake Passage toward the Falkland Islands. I’m already mulling whether we could come back here for a third visit, someday.

Utterly extraordinary.

We wandered around amid the 1,000’s of Gentoo penguins. When back to the ship, we all had to be pressure-washed down, to try to remove most of the “mud” on boots (which is a charitable word to choose)

Antarctic fur seals basking in the sun.

Magical place to begin with. Becomes even more so at certain times of day, like sunset.

Glacier ice, so compressed after thousands of years of pressure that it is almost flawlessly clear. Screams out for bourbon.

Many differences in penguin viewing from our visit 4 years ago. Then, we saw occasional chicks peeking out from the nests, under Mom or Dad. Now, two months later into the season, the chicks are losing their brown peach fuzz, and the adults are going through molting, so as to have a new and better feather layer for the winter that’s just around the corner. The molting look is not, um, particularly photogenic.

We see humpback whales frequently.

...and, dear reader, thank you for *your* understanding.

We’re in Cierva Cove, on the Antarctic mainland coast. Some of the best icebergs we’ve seen!

Ready to venture forth and do battle.

These guys were making quite a racket. Still trying to figure out how to post video with super-slow wifi. In the second photo, virtually impossible to see but the distant rocks in upper right are just solid Chinstrap penguins.

We’re anchored at Half Moon, near where a British cruise ship tried to navigate these waters, about 6 weeks ago. 😎

Barbara shoots hot air from the hair dryer into her socks, before we head out.

Our first tabular iceberg this trip. And a real beaut. You could land a 747 on this sucker.