Wednesday, January 27, 2010

JULIE PRINCE FLOWERS


www.julieprinceflowers.com

I'm going to follow my sister-in-laws lead and let you all know about my wonderful mother-in-laws new website. She has been doing flowers for a few years and is amazing!!! Her work is so beautiful. Check it out and tell your friends! She did my bouquet pictured above.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

PATAGONIA-Tierra del Fuego

Once you get to Ushuaia, it doesn't seem like you can get any farther south...but we did. We rented a car and drove south, following the peninsula as it hooks into the Atlantic. Aside from having "tea" at the Buenos Aires hotel, the other activity Liz had her heart set on was seeing the penguins. This was actually much harder to accomplish than it would seem. There is one island in Tierra del Fuego that has a colony of penguins who come to breed and rest during the summer months. This island is a protected wildlife habitat and so only 18 people are allowed onto the island each day. If you can get on it is great because you can walk around with them...if not you can get on a boat that circles the island and you take pictures from the boat...which is lame. We rented to car because the harbor you leave from is about two hours away from Ushuaia and due to annoying circumstances there was only one spot on the bus but two on the boat...so we drove, which ended up being much better. The drive winds through the heard of the Tierra del Fuego wilderness, which is full of dense forests and dozens of beautiful trout streams. If we had more time down there I would have spent 2 days just fishing. As with all Patagonian weather, the wind can be intense...below is a "flag tree". There are not many in the area, but they are all bunched together on a bluff. That is one tree that only clears the ground by about 2 inches in a few places.

More "flag trees".
This is the after driving through the mountains, we began to descend down to the harbor.

These are whale ribs and vertebrae...when Europeans first came here, it is rumored that the beaches were littered with whale bones.

We got to Harborton Estancia and took a small boat out to the island...it was a rubber boat that we slowly beached so as to not scare the penguins away.

There are two species of penguins here. I have forgotten their names but one has orange feet, wings and beak. This one builds a small rock nest on top of the ground and then sits on the eggs. This one is more endangered because the eggs are easier to get.Here you can see both species of penguins found in Tierra del Fuego. The smaller ones to the right are the other specie an they are only black and white and much smaller. They dig burrows and hatch their eggs underground. Almost all of the penguins you will see are of this kind.

The penguins here only have one natural predator...it is this bird below called a SKUA. It eats the eggs. This one was being nice because it had its baby on the log.

The species that burrow are only about 2 feet at the tallest.
This is an adolescent "black and white" penguin. You can tell because they are mostly gray for a month or so.

Mother and baby.
If you ever got close they would lower their head and turn it for some reason.

As usual the area is amazing.
Liz likes this picture....I don't know why.

They are very noisy...it was actually pretty loud with all of them in this field.


There is a new baby.


Our boat driver was wearing this full body, water proof Helly Hanson jump suit when we got in the boat...which made me a little nervous initially.
This is Harborton Estancia where we left from...that boat was not the one we took. That is the one for the losers who don't get to walk on the island...haha.






Tuesday, January 12, 2010

PATAGONIA-Ushuaia

We left the glaciers in El Calafate and flew down to the most southern city in the world...Ushuaia. This city sits ocean side at the bottom of South America as Argentina trickles into a peninsula. As you can see below, the Andes continue all the way down and the city sits between them and the Beagle Channel. This area of the world is very interesting because the Chilean peninsula runs right along side and from one island to the next the boards change. The continent breaks up down here into a series of islands all surrounded with channels of water coming from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. As such the oceans and weather change ever five minutes....it was windy and it was cold. This is obviously a port city with a big fishing industry as well as your chance to jump onto an expedition boat to Antarctica. These trips can run for two weeks and upwards of 30,000 dollars a person. Everything here was so green, a nice change from the deserts in upper Patagonia. Ushuaia is right in the middle of the region called Tierra Del Fuego (Land of Fire). Below is a picture we took while on a boat going out into the channel.

We took a boat out into the channel to visit some of the islands where the (now extinct) local tribes used to live. There are many islands out in the channel between two big sets of mountains...one belonging to Argentina and one to Chile.

These islands have been uninhabited for almost a hundred years now and due to the extremely low pollution in this part of the world, they are very pristine.
Behind us is the Beagle Channel and Ushuaia is sitting at the base of the mountains.

Liz was cold...as usual. But it was really cold so its okay.
The colors were so amazing, it was almost surreal. The sun doesn't set down here until almost 11:30pm so there is tons of time for taking great pictures in this light. This was about 10:00pm.

A colony of sea lions.
The lighthouse that sits out on the farthest island out in the channel.
The boat also took us to see some other sea lion colonies in the area.
Lots of cormorants and a seal.

The one in the middle with the big head is the male and these are all his females. They all lay on top of him to keep him warm....haha.

Ushuaia


They have a ski resort up there in the winter.