Okay, For Real This Time

What I did on my summer vacation!

My flights for this expedition took me from Anchorage to Seattle for a small layover and then on to London for a longer layover where I got to meet up with my friends Jan and Crispin. I had not seen either of them since I was in Africa back in 2009 so I was very happy they were each able to meet me for dinner that night.

The next day I headed on over to Frankfurt where I got to meet up with a long-lost cousin of mine whom I had never met before. We had a wonderful afternoon walking around the old part of town and enjoying a scrumptious late lunch. Both Lis and her partner Bruno were very nice: I’m so happy I got to meet them both.

Finally the next day I made my way to Lanzarote, with a brief layover in Madrid, where I met up with 3 of my fellow Earthwatch volunteers on the same flight I was on. We ended up sharing a taxi to the hotel since we were all going to the same place. Which reminds me: I think I still owe somebody for my share of that cost!

Our official rendezvous was in the Hotel lobby that next morning and that’s where I met the other 3 Earthwatch volunteers. We all gathered together with our gear and waited until Dr. Chris Stevenson and his assistant Ivana Adzic showed up. We had so much gear, however, that they had to make two trips to get us all to the site where we would stay for the next two weeks.

Our home away from home was La Casa de la Caldera, a 250 year old beautifully restored building that combined traditional Canarian architecture with modern facilities. We roomed together two to a suite, each suite having two bedrooms and a kitchen/dining area. There was a courtyard in the center where we gathered for our meals, and a pool out in the back to cool off after a hard day’s work. Our meals were provided for us by a real-live French Gourmet Chef and were quite scrumptious.

The work consisted mainly of mapping out the valley where Chris proposed to base his work. This meant measuring all the “features” we could find: length, width, height, rock content, and GPS location. Ivana and Chris would then enter all that date onto an aerial view of the valley once we got back to the casa each night.

Since we were the first team to work on this project, we encountered a fair amount of obstacles along the way. The logistics of getting down into the valley was just one of them: it took several days before the car rental place could find us a vehicle that could handle the goat trail they call a road, which meant we had to hike in and out each time until then. By the time Team 2 showed up, after our Team 1 had gone home, they had all the problems worked out and it was smooth sailing.

The biggest obstacle, however, was the weather. With temps as high as 110 one day (the hottest on record for that area in over 30 years) and very strong gusts of wind the next (Ivana’s sunglasses actually got blown off her face!) we just had no way of knowing how the work would progress on any given day. I’m told that Team 2 did not encounter the heat problems, but did have their fair share of wind.

I got to have a few days to myself after the expedition ended so did a few touristy type things around the island. My journey home took me from Lanzarote to London to Amsterdam to Minneapolis and finally home.