As I included in my column the last two weeks, my son and I were in the Arctic.
Having just returned home, I thought I'd share a bit of our trip, which was even more spectacular than we'd imagined.
As you may remember, I traveled with Quark Expeditions to Antarctica last fall with my daughter. I guess you could say I was bitten by the "polar bug" after that trip because after getting home, I realized it had had a profound effect on me.
Maybe it was the deep isolation in a blue and white ice world; maybe it was the spectacular nature or a combination of both. Whatever it was, I could not wait to visit the land of the "midnight sun" with Quark this year, and this trip has left me reeling, just as the last one did.
We flew from Oslo to Longyearbyen, a small town on the island of Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic. From there, we boarded our Russian expedition ship, the Akademik Sergey Vavilov, with about 70 other passengers.