Tourist visits

One of the really fun parts of Palmer for me so far has been that we get visitors to our little corner of Antarctica. I've gotten to board a few ships at this point, as well as to lead tours around the station for visiting groups, and it's been really re-energizing to see things through fresh eyes and be reminded how special it is to be here. 

For example, we recently had a yacht visit that had 12 Estonians on board who are circling the globe in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the first known sighting of Antarctica, by Estonian-born Russian explorer Bellingshausen in January 1820. After they toured the station, they invited any of us who were interested to come on board and see their private yacht. Hard to imagine this getting tossed around the Drake Passage!

We've also had small-end (100-200 passenger) cruise ships come visit, such as this National Geographic/Linblad vessel that anchored in our harbor for a couple of nights:

Their crew brought their passengers on board in Zodiacs for small group tours around station, which I trained to lead and have gotten to do on my own a couple of times since.

And then there are the BIG cruise ships, such as this Holland America vessel, the Zaandam, which bring nearly 2,000 passengers down to the Antarctic. There is no way we can have that many people at wee little Palmer, so instead, we go to them! I got to ride about 30 minutes from station in a Zodiac with 7 others for a rendezvous with the Zaandam...

...climb a Jacob's ladder into the ship...

...and spend the day in cruise boat heaven!

For the majority of the 12 hours we were on the boat, we got to just do whatever we wanted...eat whatever food they were serving, we could have swam, could have gotten haircuts and pedicures (if we'd been willing to pay cruise ship prices), and so on. Our only obligation was to participate in a couple of Q&A sessions in the ship's theater...

Which was actually totally fun.

The rest of the day, we cruised around the peninsula and I got to see some gorgeous new scenery I hadn't seen before. (The next post will just be about those new sights.)

And when our boat guys from station came back to pick us up at the end of the day, there were hundreds of people watching and filming from the starboard decks, shouting goodbye and waving to us. We felt like SUCH celebrities.

Pretty cool experiences, all around. We do these visits and tours as part of outreach and education to the public about the U.S. Antarctic Program, which is of course funded by taxpayers. It's definitely one of my favorite parts of being at Palmer, so far.