Last night, we got underway!

Freakishly beautiful, isn’t it? This is the last time you’ll be seeing land on this blog for a looooong time, so you’d better enjoy it. (The ship you will see much more of, I am sure.) We finally got underway at about 8 p.m. Friday. It took a while to get out of port – they had some stuff to take care of – and once we got into open water, the ship did start pitching a bit. I stuck a motion sickness patch on about half an hour before we left. By 9:30 I was feeling a bit wonky – mostly it’s funny when the ship is swaying while you’re trying to go up and down stairs, but it’s also a little scary.

My roommates were talking about getting thrown out of bed and trading tips, like how you can wedge yourself in by putting an immersion suit under one side of your mattress so you’re trapped between the mattress and the wall. I went to bed at 10, let the ship rock me to sleep, and slept the sleep of the dead for eight hours. It was faaaaantastic.

Now we’re in the ice (pictures to follow – holy cow, it is spectacular) so things are pretty calm.