Day Five

While having breakfast, we noticed that there was extremely dense fog outside the ship. And that is never good news. Fog is never safe for landings because the expedition staff won’t be able to see if there are polar bears in the vicinity. So our expedition leader was left with no choice other than too cancel this morning’s landing.

So without Wi-Fi, we found different ways to make ourselves at home. We battled it out through card games, made weird Mii characters on the Wii (the actual Wii wasn’t working), played the piano, and tried to play mind games on each other.

But soon enough, we made it around in the afternoon to a nearby fjord known as Whalenbergforjeden which again had the perfect scenery to help with everyone’s scientific research.

And to no surprise, we saw the Le Boreal crew bring tables out to the shore where they would set up dozens of glasses of champagne for the elderly passengers to enjoy as they explored the Arctic terrain.

Champagne on an Arctic fjord? I can confidently say that everyone had different opinions of that.

However, while all the passengers enjoyed their treats, we filled each other in on a rather interesting and highly entangled gossip story about some of the passengers on the boat. Trust me, that was our treat even though everything we discussed could have very well not been true at all.

But soon we were back on the ship for another expedition recap before dinner.

But during dinner, another ring on the intercom came on. It was a papa bear.

Everyone rushed out again, and somewhere in between I fell down the stairs, twisted, and rolled my ankle. And although I was left holding my ankle in the pain on the bottom of the stairs in an extremely painful position, it was an incredibly powerful moment for all of us on the team.

Some people went to get pictures and others helped me wobble back into my room, but after we all just spent hours in my room playing games, talking, and laughing with each other. It brought us closer together than we could have ever imagined.