We are booked to take an Antarctic Expedition Cruise because we watched the Smithsonian Channel and they showed a two hour special on an Antarctic Cruise through a company called Hurtigruten Expeditions. The show featured the MS Roald Amundsen, and it looked fantastic. It was something we had considered doing for a while, and had gained interest again when we had some friends go on a Viking Antarctic Expedition Cruise…
AS a continuation of our last post, we were barely back from our Transatlantic Cruise on Viking Ocean Cruises when we received an email from Viking about a sale on their Expedition Cruises to Antarctica. It was a short 5 day sale, and included free airfare for several dates in January and February of 2023, just a few weeks away. After we did some research, and determined that we really…
As mentioned in the previous post, we paid an additional fee so that we could choose our flights from Columbia, SC to Buenos Aires, Argentina for this trip. We initially chose a departure date for the trip of Saturday, February 4, 2023. This would give us an arrival in Buenos Aires on the morning of February 5, 2023. I had originally chosen this date because there were more available seats…
We thought we would add a little bit of information about our Expedition Ship, The Viking Octantis. The Octantis was launched in 2022, and is the sister ship to the Viking Polaris, also launched in 2022. Both of these do expedition cruises to the Antarctic during the southern hemisphere summer, and also cruise in the Great Lakes in the USA during the northern hemisphere summer. There are other voyages available…
Below is the Itinerary for the trip. It has been updated after we returned home in the “Notes” section with the actual locations we stopped on the days listed as “Explore Antarctica” on the Itinerary we originally received from Viking.
We have one week before we leave for Buenos Aires. We have been busy with non-travel related issues, mainly with both of our Mom’s. Stephanie’s mom had a brief setback last week, but now she is home and doing better. My mom is fine other than her memory, we are just having some problems with the company we hired that provides her with a caregiver for four hours each day. …
We leave on this adventure tomorrow, and we are just about ready to go. We did our packing last night and were surprised that we got near to our desired weight of 40 pounds per suitcase on the first attempt. My suitcase weighed 39.4 pounds and Stephanie’s suitcase weighed 41.2 pounds. It was not easy, we really had to think about how much clothing we needed. Knowing we have the…