29 October - En Route to Patagonia

Joe's trip started with an LIRR ride.

 Traveling from New York to Punta Arenas, Chile involves planes, trains (sometimes), and cars (sometimes) all in order to get to our boat! It's an odd bit of traveling as with layovers and multiple flights (usual route is NY to Miami to Santiago, Chile to Punta Arenas, Chile) we're travelling for more than 24 hours. I left Hampton Bays at 12:30pm on friday and arrived in Punta Arenas at 7pm saturday. And I had to adjust my watch a total of ONE HOUR!

This is not New England after the snowstorm, rather the Andes mountains as we flew south.

It's odd as you end up feeling exhausted but you're not really jet lagged as most of your travel is due south. Fortunately we all got out of NY before the snow storm arrived, but we did get to see some beautiful scenery flying over the Andes which divides Chile from Argentina. Lots of mountains, glaciers, glacier-fed lakes and luckily for us we had clear visibility so the final flights were really pretty.

A glacier feeds into a (very cold) lake in Patagonia. Unlike most places in the world, some of the glaciers in this region are actually increasing in size!