Onboard, three official languages were spoken: French, German and English. Our excursion groups onto the Antarctic coast were divided by language. So we quickly became acquainted with all of the English speakers aboard—fellow seafarers from Norway, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Japan, China, Australia and a whole bunch of us from the U.S.

The MS Fram set out to sea in a perpetual twilight. The sky never seemed to darken fully in January this far south. It was summer in this hemisphere and pitch-black night was kept at bay.

Our first night on the boat, we headed to the dining room and looked for empty spaces at tables of English speakers. The tables filled up quickly, and everyone was giddy and friendly. But by the next night, there were far fewer people in the dining room. And by the third night, we were surprised to see that large portions of our fellow travelers skipped dinner all together. The notorious Drake Passage was taking its toll on the stomachs and equilibrium of everyone onboard. Many, like me, who failed to put on their seasick patches 24 hours earlier, had sequestered themselves in their rooms to wait out the rough waters and queasy stomachs. I was too excited to spend all day in my room, besides all the decks were stocked with easy-to-find barf bags if things got out of hand.

Prior to this expedition, I’d never been seasick. That’s because I’d never experienced the Drake Passage—the tumultuous, roller-coaster-ride of ocean, where the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans meet. While I sat in a presentation orienting all of us to our first landing on Antarctica, I saw a seated woman, catapulted out of her chair! She was thrown onto the floor by the hard-knock, rock and rolling of the “Drake Shake.” Later, a friend described the journey through the Drake Passage as the one place that, “will make a grown man cry.” He wasn’t exaggerating.