My grandfather visited Antarctica in '58-'59 as part of an initiative called something like "International Year of Science." After his second year at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he traveled to Virginia and hopped on a ship.

That ship eventually traversed the Panama Canal, crossed the equator, stopped over in New Zealand, then proceeded south to Antarctica. From there they then traveled north to Melbourne, then headed west. Apparently they had engine trouble and had to stop in Perth as well. From there the proceeded to stop in Durban and Montevideo before returning to Virginia. It was a long trip...

The kicker is that he had the foresight to buy film cameras (one color, one BW) before this and filmed a bunch of stuff. A couple years ago, while preparing for a move, my grandmother found a box with reels and reels of footage, unlabeled and not in any particular order. She took it to a film processing shop, and together with people there, they pieced together a probable timeline and spliced together ~90 minutes of interesting footage out of heap and digitized it. So now I have a DVD with some pretty cool footage of that trip. Elephants, albatross, icebergs, heavy machinery down in Antarctica... that must have been an amazing trip for a guy who grew up in small-town Illinois.

My family still has the coat and rucksack he was issued, with his name on it and a pretty cool seal/patch.

After that, my grandfather went on to do a bunch of other kickass things, like found a couple engineering startups in Boston in the 60s, with varying success: flip a couple, get screwed by some shady folks... the works.

Partly because of his story, I'm heading down to Antarctica early next year, though not on anything quite so cool: just taking a two-week cruise, but I'm excited to be retracing his steps in a way.