NAHANT — At the Nahant Community Breakfast on Friday, Isabell VanMerlin talked about her trip to Antarctica, and smiling penguins greeted the attendees.
The previous community breakfast featured a Sudanese refugee, James Ayueb Buol, who came to the U.S. in 2014 and who now lives in Lynn. The next one will take place Aug. 5 at the Seaglass Village — a North Shore local network that provides additional support and resources for seniors. State Sen. Brendan Crighton will take part in the following community breakfast on Sept. 9.
The community breakfasts are a long standing tradition at the Nahant Village Church, said Marrit Hastings, one of the organizers of the event. She said that the tradition initially started with a men’s discussion group that focused on topics of interest for men, such as prostate cancer, but the women disagreed.
“The women got very upset,” said Hastings.
Gradually those breakfasts became a community event open to anybody in Nahant and surrounding communities, and the organizers try to pick topics for discussion that will interest everybody.
“It was my lifetime dream to set foot on Antarctica,” said VanMerlin.
Her lifetime dream came true in January of this year, when she finally went on a cruise and visited her sixth continent, getting a stamp from “the post office at the end of the Earth,” which was located on a pier.
VanMerlin said her trip, which began in the Argentinian town of Ushuaia to Antarctica, lasted for exactly two weeks, and she spent almost 10 of them on the ship. She initially thought that the ship’s crew would speak Spanish, but it turned out they were mostly of Filipino descent.
During her trip VanMerlin traveled to Sea Lion Island — where she learned that sea lions do not prey on penguins. She also watched albatrosses and predatory seabirds skuas, and sailed to Antarctica through Drake passage. A lot of people confuse Antarctica with the Arctic, but VanMerlin is able to discern the difference.
“The Arctic is just ice — it’s a desert too, and Antarctica is land covered with ice,” she explained.
One of the main attractions of that far away piece of the Earth is penguins. VanMerlin pointed out that there are many different kinds, but she mainly interacted with the gentoos, chinstraps, and adélies.
If camping in Antarctica and sleeping in a hole in the snow, chasing dolphins and baleen and orca whales, and seeing icebergs don’t qualify as an adventure worth traveling for, to you, traveling through COVID wouldn’t change your mind. VanMerlin said that there were people on the ship who tested positive and were taken off the cruise in Ushuaia and had to be quarantined for 10 days.
Toward the end of the community breakfast, cards with VanMerlin’s photos of a smiling chinstrap penguin were given to all of the participants to remind the community that unlike humans, the penguins are always smiling, maybe because it’s hard to be grumpy “when you have pink feet,” as the card reads.
However, as one of the participants at the breakfast, state Rep. Jim Walsh, who once took a similar trip, noted, no photos could capture the beauty of Antarctica, just as no photo can capture the beauty of the Grand Canyon.
Another participant, Elisabeth Foukal, noted that VanMerlin had now become an inspiration to her grandchildren, and VanMerlin confirmed she plans to continue her travels and make her dreams come true.
“Australia is my seven continents and that is the next one on my list,” she said.
Oksana Kotkina can be reached at [email protected].
