Cruising the Northwest Passage Extras

We recently had the opportunity to cruise the Northwest Passage from Nome to Greenland on the National Geographic/Lindblad ship Endurance. This is the route searched for for decades, most of the attempts ending either in failure or tragedy. Finally, in 1906, Roald Amundsen successfully navigated it. 

We had a wonderful expedition team of professionals and we regularly turned up in the Lounge area to hear more lectures. They varied from photography to underwater scuba to geology, history, and all the animals we would hopefully be seeing. 

My TravelQuest two-part article about this latest adventure is in the North Texas e-news, Sunday and Monday, September 10 and 11, 2022. But once I had sent the articles in, I realized I had left out a few things and so I’m adding them here. 

Our expedition leader was a Kiwi and so we had to learn a new vocabulary. If we were between expeditions or lectures, we might want a LLD, a little lie down. If we were going to land via zodiac, we could choose between a long, short, or photography LLS, little leg stretch. If a hike was a mile out and a mile back, it wasn’t two-miles round trip, it was a two-mile return. 

Two other things stand out. If you had been to both Antarctica and the Arctic (and that would have been close to 95% of the passengers), you were bi-polar. And there’s a cartoon featuring the Arctic tern that relates to being at both poles. The Arctic tern is a remarkable, if ill-mannered when guarding its nest, bird that migrates pole to pole annually. If you search for “Arctic tern returning from the north (or south) pole,” a two-part cartoon will show up explaining the terns adventures. Hilarious.