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Sign on King George's
Island, Antarctica 2013 |
At the end of 1997 Mary decided to take an early retirement offer from 3M. The deal was almost too good to refuse - full benefits for 5 years, then official retirement benefits from 3M with 5 extra years of work credit. Mary spent a year in California working at a company she knew from 3M, then returned home and worked at a local company for a while. But it didn't take long for her to realize that working for herself would be better than working for someone else, so she started Poppendieck.LLC at the end of 1999.
Her first job was overseeing a project at the State of Minnesota. The project was a relative disaster but she learned how the software world worked outside of 3M and decided to write a book about the experience. It took a year of hard work, a complete rewrite of the first draft and innumerable reviews and contributions from Tom, but in the end the book they coauthored - Lean Software Development - was a huge success.
Gradually Mary learned how to promote the book by speaking at conferences and offering classes to companies. It turned out that the classes provided far more revenue than the book, and the conferences paid for her to travel to increasingly distant places. She quickly discovered that travel was more fun and less exhausting with Tom along, and he found that travel provided excellent opportunities for his favorite pastime - photography. So he "retired" and joined Mary as she traveled.
Soon the pattern for their "retirement hobby" was established. If Mary was invited to speak at a place they had not been to, the answer was always "Yes, if you pay your share of travel for both of us." Combining multiple engagements lowered the cost for hosts and provided free time for photography. Trips to Europe became common, then the itineraries expanded into round-the-world excursions. Before long the travel included six continents and over forty countries. After two decades of "trying to be retired," the pandemic slowed things down. Tom and Mary quit "trying" and actually retired.
This is the story of our travel, the story of what it was like to visit Antarctica, South America, Africa, Australia/New Zealand, Asia, Europe, and finally, rediscover the wonders of North America.
Antarctica
We start the story with Antarctica, the last continent we visited.
You can't book a flight to Antarctica, you generally go by ship. And as long as you are at sea, you don't want to miss South Georgia Island, home to hundreds of thousands of king penguins, breeding elephant seals, and nesting seabirds. A typical trip by sea might look like this:
It takes a couple of days at sea to reach the Falkland Islands, a couple more days at sea to reach South Georgia Island, and another couple of days to reach the islands north of the Antarctic Peninsula. After exploring Antarctica, a couple of days in the Drake Passage will likely include the roughest seas of the trip. It's best to be on a ship with stabilizers for these long days at sea.
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| Three week trip to Antarctica via the Falkland Islands and South Georgia. |
The purpose of the trip is not time at sea, but photography on land - and for this you choose the season: Spring (November and December) for mating and nesting, or Summer (January and February) for babies and whales. We went twice - in 2013 and 2015 - in November both times. What follows is a photographic summary of each major destination.
Tierra del Fuego
The southern tip of South America can be rounded by ship through the longer but safer Straight of Magellan (yellow) or the treacherous Drake Passage (purple). The land in between is Tierra del Fuego, n archipelago shared by Argentina and Chile. Chile owns the Straight of Magellan and the Drake Passage. Argentina owns the land east of a line beginning at the entrance to the Straight of Magellan going south to the Beagle Channel and east along the center of the Beagle Channel to the Drake Passage. In the southwest corner of Argentina is the city of Ushuaia (red arrow), the starting point of most tourist ships traveling to Antarctica.
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| Tierra del Fuego |
We flew to Ushuaia after engagements in South America, arriving a day ahead of time in order to be sure we did not miss our ship - the National Geographic Explorer.
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| Ushuaia, the most southern city in the world and the base for most ships to Antarctica. |
The morning of our departure began with a boat tour of the Beagle Channel before boarding the ship. We saw huge colonies of imperial shags and harems of fur seals, and learned that it is difficult to take good photographs from a rapidly moving boat.
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| Thousands of imperial shags nest on islands in the Beagle Channel |
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| A fur seal harem with an aggressive male in the center rests on a rocky island in the Beagle Channel |
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| Our Ship Awaits |
Falkland Islands
Photography had to wait a couple of days as we gained our sea legs on the trip to the Falkland Islands. But we were rewarded at our first stop - New Island on the west side of the Falklands. We spent the morning photographing nesting Rockhopper Penguins, Imperial Shags, and Albatross. In the afternoon we visited nearby Carcass Island, which welcomes visitors to its large sheep farm.
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| Black-browed Albatross, Rockhopper Penguins and Imperial Shags share the same space. |
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| A nesting Black-browed Albatross and a courting pair at a nearby nest. |
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| Black-browed Albatross
 | | Pairs of Rockhopper Penguins guard their single egg. |
 | Imperial Shag (also called Blue-eyed Shag)
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| A pair of Imperial Shags |
After visiting the western Falkland Islands, we headed to Stanley, a deep-water port that serves as the capital of the Falkland Islands. The Falkland Islands are a sheep farming hub and a restocking port for ships in the southwest Atlantic. So while we were in Stanley, we toured the city, visited a remote sheep farm and toured the greenhouse complex that supplies ships and local residents with fresh produce.
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A sheep farm on Long Island, Falkland Islands
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Sheep shearing demonstration on Long Island farm, Falkland Islands
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| Lettuce in Stanley Growers Greenhouse, Stanley, Falkland Islands |
At Sea
After leaving the Falkland Islands, we were at sea for three days. Sea birds often followed our ship, looking for food in our wake. The first land we saw was a cluster of rocks rising from the sea, inhabited by a couple thousand imperial shags, appropriately named Shag Rocks. The next morning we arrived at the northwest end of South Georgia Island.
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| Pintado petrels behind our ship. They spend most of their life at sea eating shellfish and krill. |
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| A giant petrel above our ship. As a scavenger and predator, it is often found on beaches. |
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| Shag Rocks. Imperial Shags cover the rocks and fly in the foreground. |
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South Georgia Island
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| The northeast shore of South Georgia Island is home to hundreds of thousands of King Penguins. |
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| King Penguins are similar to Emperor Penguins, but much easier to see on South Georgia Island. |
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King Penguins lined the beach as far as we could see, enjoying a quick swim to clean their feathers.
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| King Penguin chicks survive the winter in brown downy coats, then grow adult feathers in spring. |
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Somehow parents find and feed their chicks - this may be the last time before the chick is on its own.
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| Chicks shed their brown feathers as their adult feathers grow. |
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Imperial Shags nest on South Georgia Island as well as nearby Shag Rock
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Pintado petrels gather to nest in a cove on South Georgia Island.
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| Giant Petrels fight each other as they scavenge a dead seal. |
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| At dawn on the beach: a bull elephant seal with his harem. |
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| Yearling elephant seals, abandoned by their mothers, entertain themselves by fighting each other |
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| A beach master defends his large harem from other bull elephant seals. |
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Small but aggressive male fur seals arrive before females and claim territory.
(A bull elephant seal might be 20 times larger.) |
In 1675 a wayward merchant ship sailed near South Georgia Island and recorded its location. A century later, James Cook claimed the island for Great Britain. Since then South Georgia Island served intermittently as a whaling and seal hunting base until the whale population could no longer the operation and the last plant closed in 1966. Today a small, rotating staff lives in the island's administrative center on King Edward Point, while nearby Grytviken museum is staffed in the summer. Grytviken buildings, built between 1904 and 1920, include a villa for the manager's family, a church, a whale processing plant, a whalers' dormitory, a storage barn, and a graveyard. Sixteen miles to the northwest, Stromness Harbour's abandoned whale and seal processing plant has been taken over by the very fur seals that were once hunted almost to extinction and processed in these facilities.
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| Stromness Harbour's abandoned whale processing station has been taken over by fur seals. |
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| Grytviken's Norwegian church, rusting whale processing plant and manager's villa (now a museum). |
South Orkney and the South Shetland Islands
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| We stopped the South Orkney Islands (ship) and the south Shetland Islands on the way to Antarctica. |
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| Chinstrap penguins are great rock hoppers and climbers. Huge colonies look like ants on the hills. |
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Look closely: many of the penguins are incubating an egg in a nest made of small rocks.
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| To build a nest, chinstrap penguins carry many individual rocks from the sea up a steep, snowy cliff. |
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A chinstrap penguin jumps out of the sea for a quick breath while swimming fast.
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| At Point Wild on Elephant Island, chinstrap penguins surround a memorial to Luis Pardo Villalón, pilot of the boat that that rescued 22 men from the Shackleton expedition stranded here in 1916. |
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| A rare sight: a leopard seal nursing her pup. Penguins often become a meal for these apex predators. |
Humpback whales entertain us by playing near our ship. (Double click to see large video.)
Antarctic Peninsula
The Falkland Islands host the largest population of southern rockhopper penguins. South Georgia Island is home to hundreds of thousands of King Penguins. Chinstrap penguins dominate the rocky cliffs of the South Orkney and South Shetland Islands. Gentoo penguins thrive in the relatively mild weather found near the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Adelie Penguins are dependent on sea ice, so they are found in increasing numbers further south. Emperor Penguins spend most of their time on sea ice far from water and are not usually seen from ships touring Antarctica.
