Tamara arrives at the house at 8:45 am. We take a few pictures, and then load up and go. This is a momentous time for all of us. While we are ready to embark on this amazing trip, Tamara’s marathon is tomorrow up in Columbus!! The last 6 months of preparation and planning is about to culminate for all of us!
Here we are, ready to go, posing with our packed bags as Tamara captures the moment in a photograph. Space will be at a premium on this trip. We are allowed a large duffel bag and a backpack each. Mike is sporting an atypical-for-him beard, which he grew for the anticipated cold weather.
Our friend Tamara, who graciously offered to drive us to the airport.
Rocky -- our mascot for the trip. Our friends, Dave and Dorothy, gave him to us months before, as we were training for the run. Rocky was a Roche Pharmaceuticals convention handout, made of spongy rubber, probably intended to be squeezed as a stress reliever. Dave or Dorothy had written "Marathon Penguin" on his chest. It did not take us long to start having some fun with him, photographing him in key spots along the way, building a "story" of his travels. These photos became a photo-journal of Rocky which we presented to Dave and Dorothy after our return. Here, he is perched atop our packed bags, ready to go!
At the airport, waiting for our flight, we get a quick snack. Our cell phone rings. It is Dorothy… she informs us that Daniel was just successful in the phone lottery and got us tickets for the Reds Opening Day!! Wow! A good omen, since these tickets are so hard to come by. Something to look forward to this Spring, although it seems like worlds away right now.
Board the flight to Tallahassee. All is uneventful and on time. We (Joan mainly) have been so concerned that in February, we could get delayed by bad weather on the Cincy end, and miss our connections to the Buenos Aires flight, but everything seems to be cooperating, and that is one potential glitch that we have now gotten past without a problem. On the approach to Tallahassee, we notice very unusual circular patterns in the fields below. Not just a few, but hundreds of them, for miles and miles. Fields that are cultivated and cut in circles vs. the typical patchwork squares, different sections segmented like slices of a pie, the “wasted space” outside the circles just left in grass or trees. Never did get an explanation of what that was all about.
In Tallahassee, we look for something familiar, but cannot even determine where the city is. (Years before, we lived in Tallahassee while Mike was attending Florida State University.) This airport appears to be out in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but pine forests and sink holes around. It is very quiet at this airport…. Except for the couple of jet fighters that take off from the commercial runways! Later, as we are on the plane waiting to take off for Miami, we are number 2 in line to take off, and number 4 in line behind us is another fighter jet, his cockpit canopy still open and jutting up in the air.
The flight to Miami is an easy one. One hour down the west coast of Florida, then across the Everglades and into the Miami area from the west. In Miami, we are far in advance of our flight time to Buenos Aires, but we find the Aerolineas Argentinas counter to get ourselves checked in. And we begin to meet other members of our group who converge there for the same reason. For the first time in the 18 months that we have been thinking, planning and talking about this trip, we are not the only oddballs doing this!
We meet Rudy (New Orleans) & George (Anchorage, AK), who had met on a previous Marathon Tours trip in Athens, Greece. Each has run dozens of marathons. Jeff (Milwaukee), who has already done a marathon on all 7 continents (including a previous Marathon Tours Antarctica run), and who is working on the 7 continents the second time around. And Jerry (Evansville, IN) who knew Jeff from the Great Wall of China run. OK. We are starting to get it. We are beginning to understand the company we are about to keep. What in the hell are we doing here????? Then we meet another Jeff, this one a med student from Kansas, and Mary (finally, another woman besides Joan), who appear to be a bit more novice. As we talk with all of these folks, we hear them all saying the right things…. They are not here to run the marathon for time. They are here for the adventure and the experience. Etc. etc. It is helpful especially to talk to Wisconsin Jeff (Jeff Turner), since he has done the Antarctica trip before. We begin to get over our initial panic, and regain a bit of composure, if not confidence.
We have a long wait in Miami – 5 hours. Mike calls Ed Brady, asking his help in letting the Baseball League know I will be coming back. That was one “to do” on list prior to leaving that I had missed. We then call Mom and Irv, have a nice chat, they wish us bon voyage, and we say goodbye. We will stop here and stay with them on our return trip. We can only imagine what we will have experienced by then. After that call, we wait. And sit, eat, wait, talk, wait, walk around, wait. We remember that we wanted to bring a deck of cards and never packed any, so we find a gift shop and buy them. We figure when we are passing the time at sea, and cannot read for fear of sea-sickness, playing cards might help. (Funny, this seemed really important at the time, but at the end of the trip, those cards would still be packed in their original cellophane wrapper!) Finally, the time comes to board the flight to Buenos Aires.
The flight to Buenos Aires will take 8 ½ hours. We have dinner on the plane shortly after takeoff, then get some sleep – more than expected. Then comes breakfast. Time in Argentina is 2 hours ahead of Eastern Time. Looking at the time zone maps, it appears that they have rebelled and insisted on being different from Chile, even though it would seem to make much more sense for both of them to be just 1 hour ahead of Eastern Time. It makes for some very funny happenings in the very south, where islands to the east of Argentina are owned by Chile, and so the time zones go back and forth. For example, if you are traveling West to East, you hit 5:00, then 6:00, then 7:00, then 6:00 again, then 7:00 again. I wonder how all this will translate to time in Antarctica, as the lines of longitude converge even more sharply.
View of sunrise from the airplane window, enroute to Buenos Aires.
Rocky stares out the airplane window, deep in thought.
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