Day Fourteen

For our last excursion ever, we were out on the island of Flatey – an island that only has 6 people. Imagine that?

It was a beautifully quaint town that was nothing more than one kilometer long. During our two hour stay in the island, we were given a presentation by one of the residents in the church and were offered a chance to watch an Arctic tern show.

But most of us were preoccupied because today was presentation day.

Throughout the trip, we had been conducting personalized research projects where we received assistance from not only our teachers but the highly acclaimed expedition staff. By this point, everyone on the ship was pretty curious on why these teenagers had been lugging around scientific equipment wherever we went. So we thought it would be cool to share our findings at the last expedition recap, which would take place right after this excursion.

Right before our Cruise Director, Jannie, got into the details of our departures, the Harker School took the stage for each of us to give one minute presentations about our research. And they were all truly awed. We did a great job presenting such high quality information.

Coming off the stage with smiles, we didn’t know what was going to hit us next.

After all the departure information which already made as super nostalgic, we were shown a 17 minute 39 second slide show presentation of our travels. 17 minutes and 39 seconds seems like an incredibly negligible amount of time to capture the life changing things we had been doing for the past couple of weeks but it surely did leave a couple tears on our faces. It was incredibly bittersweet.

It was hard to believe that what we had considered home for the past two weeks, we would be leaving behind forever and never coming back to. Ironic because isn’t that what I said on day one before we left for the Arctic in the back loading zone of the Harker School?

But no fear, we had one last tour in the afternoon on buses where we went through the lava trails of Iceland and a shark museum.

After that short excursion out, we were back to the ship where it was very visible that everyone the ship was very sad to be leaving.

To soak in our last couple of hours together on the ship before leaving bright and early for the morning, we just hung around and packed (of course) trying to get ourselves comfortable with leaving our beautiful home, Le Boreal.