This trip has been two years in the making! My school is amazing and grants sabbatical leave for staff who’ve worked there for 10 years. So when my leave became available, I started having a think about what I wanted to do with it.
My first instinct was to tack some of the leave onto a school holiday and travel with the family (Japan & Canada are high on my wish list!). However, that would mean taking the children out of school – and it’s nigh-on impossible for Adam to take longer than 2 weeks off work. So family travel was pretty much ruled out.
I started thinking about what I could do on my own – and ideally tie it in with something I could use in school. I was teaching in Year 5 at the time and our Autumn Term topic was centered around Antarctica. I’d been back in Year 5 for 3 years at that point – and Antarctica was by far my favourite topic to teach. We looked at geography, animals, environmental issues – and Shackleton.
If you’re not familiar with Ernest Shackleton’s expedition to the South Pole, I highly recommend reading his book: South. It is one of the most incredible stories of survival and determination I’ve ever read.
For children, I would highly recommend the beautiful Shackleton’s Journey by William Gill. There is also a beautiful hardcover book called South with Endurance, which is a collection of photographs taken on the expedition by Frank Hurley. The photographs are just stunning and really capture what the crew went through – the accompanying text is fascinating too.
So I started researching companies offering trips to Antarctica. It took a long while for me to find a company offering the kind of trip I was looking for. I really wanted to see as much wildlife as possible and I was keen to travel as far south as we could. As a family, we went to Finland in 2015 and we stayed above the Arctic Circle line. I thought it would be pretty cool to be able to cross the Antarctic Line as well! Oceanwide Expeditions (www.oceanwide-expeditions.com) offered that exact combination. An enquiry about the trip led to a deposit paid – and here we are!
I’m writing this on the day before departure and am really just trying to get my thoughts together. It’s been such a long time on coming, I can’t believe the time to go has actually arrived! I don’t think I’m going to quite believe that it’s all happening until I’m standing on the deck. I’m feeling a little nervous at the moment: I’ve never travelled so far on my own, I haven’t been away from my family for more than a few of days and I’ll be sharing a cabin with three people I’ve never met. But getting out of my comfort-zone is a big part of this trip, so feeling slightly nervous is a good sign! And I’m sure that the other travellers on the ship will be like-minded people! All-in-all I’m excited – and ready for an adventure!
Non-Sense 