Whenever it's time to start planning another trip with Hideaways, my wife, Jo, and I like to pull out the map and look for some intriguing place we've never been before. This time our inspiration came from an issue of Scientific American magazine, which featured a South American cruise through the Strait of Magellan and around Cape Horn. Eureka!

Although we'd traveled to South America twice before, Jo and I had never been to the southern regions of Chile and Argentina. The sailing we chose sounded especially interesting because it would be passing through the narrow Beagle Channel, named for the ship HMS Beagle, which carried Charles Darwin into the area on one of his naturalist trips of the 1830s. The cruise also promised many on-board lectures by distinguished scientists in the fields of geology, physics, and oceanography-always appealing to a scientist like myself (my background is in biology).

May/June 2013