Our Avianca flight from Bogota to Santiago was a bit bumpy right after take off, but otherwise smooth. We all caught some sleep during the four and a half hour trip. Interesting to discover was that Bogota is in Eastern Standard Time (GMT-5), while Santiago is in Atlantic Daylight time (GMT-4 less an hour for summer daylight savings since it’s summer time here in the southern hemisphere now). Bonaire and Aruba are both in Atlantic Standard Time year round.

We were met by our guide Pablo and our driver Patricio and taken to our hotel where we caught an early breakfast and then slept until noon local time. This afternoon Pablo is taking us on a three hour private tour of Santiago.

I wasn’t expecting to post anything today, but we stumbled across an American Airlines Admiral’s Club at the Eldorado Airport here in Bogota, Colombia, where they have free Internet access. It’s good to be a club member!

Didn’t do much in Aruba other than eat and relax today, and escaped just in time before the roads were closed for the Carnival Light Parade tonight.

Below is our GPS track information for the flight. The altitude tracking did not did work properly for this track, so I’m not including it (it has a maximum altitude of 8000 feet, which seems to imply that it is measuring altitude by a pressure sensor and not GPS – 8000 feet is the typical pressure of an aircraft cabin).

We leave Bogota in a couple of hours. Next stop: Santiago.

In order to make it easier to follow our current journey, I will be post our GPS tracking information as a separate post from any commentary or pictures.

Here is our first GPS track – flying from Bonaire to Aruba and spending the rest of the day in Oranjestad, the capital of Aruba. And since we tracked via GPS while in flight, I have included an altitude chart too. Remember, you can zoom in on the map and also click the red light bulb icons to see more details about those particular waypoints.

In preparation for our trip to the Antarctic circle, as documented in my previous post, I purchased a Garmin Oregon 550 handheld GPS a couple of months ago and have been playing around with it, tracking my location on planet Earth. The idea of the purchase was that using whatever Internet connection I could find en route, I would post updates as to what path we had followed since the last post using latitude and longitude information. The missing bit was finding a simple way to display that information on one of our multitude of web sites in a comprehensible form.

Last night I stumbled across a wonderful plug-in for WordPress (the software used to generate most of my blogs), written by Patrick Matusz from Switzerland. The plug-in is called “XML Google Maps“. The brilliant thing about this plug-in is that it takes .GPX files, such as those generated by my Garmin GPS, and displays the captured tracks and waypoints in Google Maps. That in turn means you can zoom in and out, turn on and off satellite views, and do pretty much anything else that Google Maps permits. Kudos to Patrick! I will note that since tracks and waypoints appear to be stored in separate GPX files, I use a program called EasyGPS to consolidate them into a single .GPX file which I can then submit to the XML Google Maps plug-in for viewing.

Below is an example of a track captured today while the kids and I went to a presentation at CIEE Bonaire on how to help the Bonaire National Marine Park capture lionfish:

If you click on one of the two pink light bulb things above, you will see a pop-up of the waypoints I stored at those two locations, including the latitude and longitude, and the elevation. Very cool, even if I say so myself.

For those of you who were notified about a Test GPS Map on the blog last night, my apologies – I accidentally published a test map, which I then later deleted, resulting in an error if you tried to pull up the link in the e-mail notification.

Some of you may be aware that the next expedition for The Traveling Richters is to the southern-most climes of planet Earth. We won’t quite make it to the South Pole, but we’ll be spending a couple of weeks in February in the vicinity of the Antarctic Circle, a week of which we’ll actually be making landings on various parts of the Antarctic Peninsula.

People have been asking us why we’re going there. Simple answer is that we are helping outfit a school for underprivileged penguins and to see the polar bears. Oh, so you say there are no polar bears in the Antarctic? Perhaps that’s because the penguins ate them?

Seriously, though, the Antarctic has been a dream of ours for decades, and with global climate change charging onward without a reversal in sight, we figured we had better pay our respects now before things change too much. Furthermore, even if global climate change does not materially affect the Antarctic in the next 30 years, we’d rather go now when we’re hearty and hale instead of when joint pains and older age potentially inhibit our full exploration and enjoyment of this natural wonder.

We booked our trip with Lindblad Expeditions last summer, to travel with them on their vessel, the National Geographic Explorer. Lindblad started a brilliant partnership with NatGeo several years ago, and the naming of their vessels is part of the deal, as is the inclusion of National Geographic’s experts as docents, photographers, and guides on these journeys.

Of course, being that we live in a tropical climate (the Caribbean island of Bonaire), one of the most interesting challenges has been to gather all the gear we think we will need to stay warm and relatively dry on our Antarctic journey. Lindblad has a list of recommended things to pack (PDF) for the expedition. It doesn’t look like much, but it’s taken us several months to get everything we need down to Bonaire, ensuring it all fits. One complication has been that Bas is a growing 12 year old boy and we’ve had to try and guess how much bigger he might be by mid-February, including how big his feet will be. Just one unexpected growth spurt could leave him buck naked in Antarctica (or wearing my clothes, which would be over-large on him). But we think (or hope) we have it under control.

The other issue we’ve been facing is that several of our flights have restrictions on luggage and carry-ons. Considering we’re planning on taking several computers, several DSLR cameras, a video camera or two, and who knows what else in terms of technological equipment, we’re having a heck of a time trying to figure out how to get it all on a plane with us. We’ll definitely be donning photographer’s vests on the smaller planes, and hoping that we can carry some of the bits and pieces we need that way.

In the next few weeks as we start actually packing, I will post photos here of what all is coming with us, for your amusement. And another project I’m working on is some web-based software which will allow me to upload data from my Garmin Oregon 550 GPS so that our fans can track our path on a daily basis. That of course will be contingent on two things: 1) That GPS satellites are functional that far south; and 2) that we will have a passable Internet connection that far south (there’s on-board satellite Internet on the ship).

In the meantime, we’re reading up on Chile, Easter Island, and the Antarctic, and watching the few documentaries we could find at Amazon.com.