Its a harsh continent

I climb into the driver’s seat, cinch down my seat belt, plug in some tunes and turn the Delta into a disco dance party. Ready to drive the twenty miles to Cape Evans, Antarctica via a route less traveled, marked by flags on a road constructed yearly of compacted sea-ice.
Happiness levels cranked up to high, we reach the end of the road, night sunlight glowing in the sky,lighting up the ice like a stain glass window. The majestic Royal Society Mountain Range rises out of the ice to the south with massive peaks and dramatic glaciers filling the landscape. Icebergs, radiating colors of turquoise that a Crayola box is yet to see. Icicles bigger than me drip with a slightly salty taste from the sea. We walked the final mile to the hut used during the South Pole expedition of 1910 led by Robert Falcon Scott.
We glide and slide on frozen sea ice fused with cracks and seams like veins extending in all directions South. Giddy with amazement, we carefully navigate toward the hut, jumping over larger cracks in the ice as we moved closer to shore. Standing on the doorstep of history, in the foreground of a snow-covered volcano, smoke pluming, lives a museum that is frozen in time.
I brush the snow off my boots and enter the time capsule. Standing in the kitchen I feel like a guest in a home. Shelves of spices, salts, vinegars, oils, and jams line the kitchen wall. Tin cups hang from hooks, plates stacked on counters, and a royal blue hand-painted porcelain vase with an Asian flare rests in the center of the kitchen table. Boxes stacked floor to ceiling of flour, wheat meal, tins of meat paste and ham loaf. The men’s personal spaces captured my heart with newspaper cutouts and ink drawings of cats and dogs taped to the ends of the bunks. What most captivated me though was the smile of a woman in a photograph printed on silver, old, stained and scratched, with a weathered turquoise oval frame. I wondered who she was and why her photograph was there. I was certain she was someone of importance, someone one of the men loved. Later, I found out the woman in the photograph was the Mother of Captain Scott.
Our shoes like ice skates we smoothly move through the field of icebergs and back to our mighty Delta delighted by the magical scenery of the Antarctic. We boarded our Delta, the engine sounding like an angry kitten, topping out at speeds of twelve miles an hour on the turbulent ride back to McMurdo Station.

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