Better Tarde Than Never!

Well, my splendid plans to blog from the road didn't really go the way I'd hoped. I didn't realize that I wouldn't have any Internet access on the cruise ship, never having cruised before. So once we left our hotel in Buenos Aires for our flight to Ushuaia, that was pretty much it for me communication-wise for a while. Upon our arrival in Punta Arenas, Chile and subsequent flight to Santiago, bus ride to Valparaiso and various rushings and scurryings about, I found myself either physically, mentally or energetically unable to do much more than scribble my thoughts and impressions as eloquently and with as much detail as I could muster into a journal, which I did keep with the loyalty of the truly muse-pecked.

So!! Additional stuff is yet to come about the trip, which was incredible. Photos will be showing up here, and decsriptions of the few hours in Ushuaia, the good ship Stella Australis, the rounding of Cape Horn and visit to the Cape Horn monument, soccer playing at the bottom of the world, a visit to a long-abandoned settlement, a magical hour with the Aguila Glacier, and the sound of 80,000 pairs of penguins clapping. Braying. Doing what penguins do. Amazing.

Then I will talk about our arrival in Punta Arenas, our flight to Santiago, the bus ride to Valparaiso that almost never was, due to the frightening broken down taxi experience of yours truly with two children and a load of luggage in the middle of the busiest intersection in the heart of Santiago, our unlikely arrival and welcome in Valparaiso into the home of Lydia and her Chilean acrobat/clown/magician boyfriend Angel, and it just gets better and better.

So settle down with a tall glass of jugo de pina and a plate of papas fritas and await the further exploits of yours truly and the rest of the Through My Eyes and Hit and Run History crews, coming soon to a blog near you. This blog, in fact.

AND-- as a special added bonus, I will also announce that I have officially, as of this date, given myself and my life over wholly to the muse of fiction writing, so I will be keeping strange hours, wandering around in even more of a fog than usual, spouting colorful language, bursting into laughter or tears without explanation and generally being as Jen Sexton as I can possibly be until further notice and the emergence of my newest indie fiction blockbuster. Mama needs a new pair of zapatos, baby.

And so,
I remain,
Jen

The Adventure Begins... Tomorrow!!

Well, the Great Adventure begins tomorrow!

I wish I could say that I am as cool as the penguins we will be seeing, but instead I am all hopped up and jangling, crazily running from room to room, making lists, piling up clothing and gear and going a bit crazy. My friends and family are calling and emailing me and messaging me on Facebook, all reminding me to breathe and calm down. Ahhh.

We received two beautiful Magic Beanies from the marvelous Janice Callahan today-- one with a penguin emblem and one with two pirate symbols. How perfect! Ava and I can't wait to show them to Sofie, Andrew and Jay and Clay, the intrepid Team Penguin, when we begin our journey tomorrow to the end of the world. But first-- a good night's sleep and some last minute battening down of various hatches in the morning. Whew! Didn't we just do this? Imagine traveling first to the other side of the globe to China, and then from here to the bottom of the globe, to Cape Horn, within the space of 11 months! Now imagine doing that at age eight!

We couldn't have done it without you. Thank you!

I remain,

Jen

We Did It!!!

We Did It! We reached our fundraising goal!

Thank you!! Today is Wednesday, and we leave for Cape Horn on Sunday!

I just got off the phone with my excellent good friend Betsy Bray, who traveled to Cape Horn and took the same excursion last year. She is kindly loaning me her waterproof trekking gear, which is wonderful because we are not only doing this project on a shoestring- we are doing it on the little tiny hard thing on the end of the shoestring. What do you call that thing again? Say it with me: AGLET! We are doing this trip on an aglet, and every little bit of cost avoided is a good thing. So today I will pick up my loaned gear and then start a hunt for the same things in mini-size for Miss Ava. Waterproof trekking boots, waterproof gloves, waterproof pants and some decent fleecy stuff, sunglasses, and a cap.

I also need to address the subjects of various camera memory cards and batteries, travel documents, how to pack what into what bags, where the gear goes, and how to REMAIN CALM.

Less than four days until we leave! I am so excited! And nervous!

I remain,

Jen

A Most Auspicious Beginning

(Can you believe this photo exists?)

Welcome to my brand new blog! This is rather a chaotic point in time in which to begin a blog, with lots of crazy stuff going on, but as I tried to wait for The Right Time to Start Blogging I recalled an exchange in a short play I wrote called “American Super Wok”. The female character is meeting with a guy she hardly knows in an out-of-the-way Chinese restaurant to discuss the fact that she is expecting his child.

He: If you wait for the right time, the right place—

She: The right person—

He: —the right circumstances for it to ‘make sense’—

She: —for it to not be completely stupid and insane—

He: —until you have enough money, steady work, a good place to live—

She: —a sense of personal identity, a path in life, security, stability—

He: —a plan—

She: A plan?

He: If you wait for all that, well, you may as well give it up. You’ll never do it. Sometimes the baby to have is—

She: —the one you’re already pregnant with.

He: Right.

So. In that vein, sometimes the blog to start is the one you’re already pregnant with. So! Welcome to this birth of this blog. Not the perfect start, but it’s a start. Ahem. A Most Auspicious Start, in fact. Cough. And here we are.

To get you up to speed: right now there are six days left in my Kickstarter campaign to raise $9,750 for airfare to get myself, my partner Andrew Giles Buckley, our two children and our crew members Jay Sheehan and Clayton Harper to South America to shoot the second adventure in my web series Through My Eyes. We’ve got $7, 799, with $1,951 left to raise before the deadline on March 12. If we don’t meet our goal, we get nada. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Goose egg.

Take a look, please, at the Kickstarter promotional video at http://www.avaandsofie.com/, and watch all 13 episodes of the first Through My Eyes adventure, China: Through My Eyes, at WGBH.org/kids. It’s a child’s eye travel documentary following Ava and Sofie, ages seven and eight, as they explore three cities in China’s Pearl River Delta and share their adventure with everybody back home, from elementary school students to teachers, parents, homeschoolers, and adventurers of all ages and walks of life.

We leave for South America on March 18. That’s about a week and a half away. A week from Sunday! We'll fly from Boston to Buenos Aires and travel south to Ushuaia, Argentina, where we will depart on a Cruceros Australis cruise ship to round Cape Horn, rubbing shoulders with penguins, elephant seals and glaciers along the way and following in the historic watery footsteps of explorer Ferdinand Magellan and naturalist Charles Darwin. Then we will land in Punta Arenas and travel to Santiago, Chile before heading back home to Boston. What an adventure!

To make it more exciting — because it needs to be even more exciting, right? — I had a thyroid biopsy today, and will be waiting nearly a month for the results as we travel 6,752 miles away, around Cape Horn and back. It’s good to keep busy, right? I hope to blog along the way, sharing impressions and photos as we go. I think it’s going to be pretty wonderful.

Welcome aboard the — uh — newborn ship “Jennifer Sexton’s Blog”. You may lose some sleep, and you may get a bit seasick, but that’s what newborn ships and mixed metaphors are all about. So put that in your pipe and see who salutes!

I remain,

Jen