Our first two full days at sea passed in a blur of safety briefings, naps, and lurching waves. You have to pass through The Drake Passage to get to Antarctica. Just the phrase, The Drake, conjures images of fear, trepidation, and nausea in even the most experienced polar explorer. The Drake Passage is the roughest water in the world. At night when you lay in bed, you can feel yourself jiggling back and forth and side to side just like a Jello Jiggler. I don’t know if we were actually moving, or if it just felt like a gelatin roller coaster. But when you try to walk on the boat during rough waters, it feels more like you are standing up on a moving bus in Rome.

Everyone, not just thetwinsontour, need motion sickness patches for this. There are random motion sickness bags in the handrails, stairways, bar, and dining room. They are literally all over the ship just in case. Luckily thetwinsontour didn’t need any of these emergency motion sickness bags.

The patch has several side effects. It gives you dry mouth and therefore makes you very thirsty. The patch also makes you want to sleep all of the time. Like all of the time. And weirdly, it also makes your pupils much larger. It’s kind of like you got your eyes dilated at the eye doctor.

The first 2 days on the ship were millions of safety briefings for all of the activities. Sometimes they were 15 minutes apart and sometimes they were an hour apart. But all of them had a nap in between. We were so tired. I wish we could have slept 48 hours straight.

Despite all of this being tossed around, the crew said that this was a very easy Drake Passage. The ship’s captain even told one of the girls in our group that on a scale of 1 to 10 that this was a negative 1. Thetwinsontour do not agree!

The lecture room on the 3rd floor is the worst place to be during rough water because it’s at the very front of the ship, it’s down low, and it has no windows. Do you know what else that describes? Our room! We are the first room outside of the lecture hall. Hence our room is the worst on the ship.

That is pretty much all that I have to report from the first 2 days at sea.

Love,

thetwinsontour