The Traveling Widower

Category: travel

  • Cruising Antarctica  – Photos only

    November 26th, 2025

    I have completed a very brief first pass through the images that I’ve capture from this incredible journey. Some I have already posted, others are recently curated, but I thought it would be nice to just have a single post, with a few of the best what I’ve digested so far. Unfortunately the software has limitations on how many images I can include in a gallery. I’m grouping them by topic: Penguins, Seascapes, Mountains & Glaciers, Ships & People & Everything Else. I will limit my blatherings to just brief description of each category.

    Remember that you can enlarge any photo by double tapping it.

    Penguins

    I placed this on top, since it’s probably what most readers are interested in. We visited four different colonies, and spotted penguins pretty much everywhere we traveled to or through. The little critters cover a lot of territory to feed. We saw two types, Adelie and Gentoo. There were a few Chinstraps spotted, but I did not see them. The birds were nesting at all of the colonies, and I did include one picture where the penguin stood up and you can see the mottled egg. Chicks were not born yet. The colonies are all large, noisy, stinky and very messy. You have to clean and disinfect your boots when you get on board. The photos are all mixed up, so if you are interested, the Adelie penguins have the all black heads, and the Gentoos have the black and white with the longer orange beak.

    Seascapes

    This category is mostly icebergs and sea ice – pretty much all the ocean images that were not of the shoreline (next category). We did see a lot of whales during our cruising, but I did not bother with the camera since there was nothing really worth capturing. We did see a very exciting encounter between a pod of Orca’s and two Humpback whales last night, but the photographs would just have shown some fins at a distance. Apparently, the Humpacks were adults, and the Orca’s were just being jerks. It was not a real fight. Once one of the Humpbacks started fin slapping, the Orcas beat a hasty retreat. I’m blathering….sorry.

    Mountains and Glaciers

    I’d have to say that this was some of the most amazing scenery I’ve seen in my entire life. I have seen (and fallen down) mountain glaciers before, and cruised around the glaciers in Alaska, but the views of huge mountain, and the continental glaciers literally falling into the sea were beyond belief. I was speechless so often.

    Ships & People & Everything Else

    I did manage to photograph subjects other than penguins – a lot of pictures of the ship, zodiacs cruising around, people on the stable sea ice (a new term for me), and some other odds and ends that I photographed. I have not written about everything we’ve done on the trip (yet) and may do another post to cover some of these leftovers.

    And a couple of others for good measure

  • A Quiet Morning (At Long Last)

    After eleven straight days of waking at Oh-Dark-Thirty, endless plane rides, and constant activity on the ship, today I was able to sleep in, spend time curating and organizing some of the thousands of photos I took this trip. We are at sea in the Drake Passage, on the way back to Ushuaia, and then back home via three flights. Ugh. Where’s that transporter room? There are a lot of activities on board today, and I even have a massage scheduled,  but there is still time to do what I’m doing right now. Sitting in a comfortable chair in the deck 8 Library, which sits over the bow, looking out at the ocean and the occasional albatross or petrel that flies by. I might drag the camera out later today. You can never have too many photos, but I’m getting close.

    I’ll have one more post on the odds and ends excursions, non-penguin related, and might also do a photo-only post of the top, lightly curated images from the trip. I thought I had made a dent in processing all the pics this morning, when I realized that it was only one folder out of 8 on my 4TB SSD drive. I’ll be busy when I get home for a few days. 

    Darn,there goes another Snowy Petrel. Maybe I will get the camera.