Today is the big day, the day we leave home and head to Palmer Station which will be home away from home for most of us until mid-June.

The photo is Jim, Michelle, Maggie, and me unloading our gear from the Biology Department truck at the Birmingham airport. We will fly to Dallas, where we will meet up with CJ who is coming from Colorado. In Dallas we will also link up with one of our two colleagues from the University of South Florida, Andrew Shilling.

From Dallas we fly overnight to Santiago, Chile. Sabrina is already there sampling Plocamium at the Chilean National Museum of Natural History, as she told you in the last post. We will reconnect with her and our second USF colleague, Dr. Bill Baker, at the Santiago airport and then fly to Punta Arenas, Chile.

If all goes well, about 28 hours after we board our plane in Birmingham we’ll be getting off the plane in Punta Arenas. We will have two nights in Punta Arenas before starting the four-day transit to Palmer Station via ship.

We will try to tell you about our pre-sailing activities in Punta Arenas from there or from the ship soon after we sail. The internet connectivity from the ship is extremely limited so we will not be able to post much. We are due to Palmer Station on 20 February. Once we are there, you can expect to see new posts first thing every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning.