Route

Ultimately I will arrive in Amsterdam at the beginning of September to start my internship at the International Institute of Social History. Although Amsterdam and my internship were the initial seeds from whence the educational leave germinated, it feels like the planning of what comes before has consumed me more.

One Friday morning I started thinking about Buenos Aires while doing my shift at the Reference Desk (I will never know where these nuggets of future dreaming come from, but they most often visit me as I start coming up on my morning cup of coffee). Since the reflexes of information professionals are instilled in muscle memory, I automatically went to the online catalog and dropped various boolean keyword searches into the advanced search:

(buenos aires AND tour*)
((argentina OR buenos aires) AND (tour* OR travel*))

Thanks to my nearly 11 years of employment in Gleeson Library at USF, it's as if an Ignacio search is a more accurate litmus test of available information than a google search. (This will be a hard habit to break once Gleeson's holdings are no longer physically available to me.)

I ended up with a couple books, including Bad Times in Buenos Aires by Miranda France, which I had devoured by nightfall the following Saturday due to its easily ingested personal essay style. That night my dreams percolated Porteños and cargo sea vessels; Sunday I awoke with a new bizarre desire to connect Buenos Aires and Amsterdam by freighter route. Again, I conducted searches and examined maps by rote as I was coming up on my morning cup of coffee. It wasn't until later, answering people's questions and discussing the plans with friends, that I pieced together the disparate motivations that resulted in a an epic itinerary:

Alejandra Pizarnik, one of my favorite poets and a portion of whose work I have translated from Spanish to English, is Argentine and was born and raised in a suburb of Buenos Aires;

Entangled in the rungs of life's ladder, I had done preliminary research and developed a small obsession with oceanic travel when working on my MFA thesis in 2009. This poem comes to mind as evidence:

22: twenties wind up

expect
thirty

to fully
change stream of
life shave head

and quit job i'll
banish headaches
fling my soul roof
tops above strange

cobblestone streets cross
atlantic freighter
mom left supplied for
housed or dead—scary
truthful provision

youth is
high gloss shell
without money
skills or discipline


kelci m. kelci © 2009

View Kelci's journey: part 1 in a larger map

Click Kelci's journey: part 1, above, to more easily track my route and gather information such as destinations and dates.

And so, a couple months ago, I set about the deeply preoccupying task of connecting Buenos Aires and Amsterdam by freighter route, whose triumphs and tribulations may be better served in a separate entry; suffice to say at this point I have purchased an itinerary for the Northbound journey on the Grande Buenos Aires, a freighter ship operated by Grimaldi Lines. I will board the ship on August 2, I will be at sea for approximately 28 days, and the ship is scheduled to visit the following ports between Buenos Aires, my point of embarkation, and Antwerp, my point of disembarkation: