Transcripts

ANN BANCROFT: Going through large and small communities and then having events and meeting with people both deliberately and then, of course, spontaneously. So even I call this a social trip in some ways because all of our other expeditions have been so isolated, where it's just been the two of us or whomever we've been traveling with. And we've been much more isolated.

INTERVIEWER: Were there any physical challenges to this trip that are comparable to some of your other ones?

ANN BANCROFT: Well, I think if you're talking about comparing it to Antarctica, it's not really a fair comparison. We weren't trying to go from one point to another so much. What we were trying to do is interact with an audience that we began chatting with a year and a half ago as we crossed Antarctica.

So although we were using the kayaks and the waterway as our vehicle, it was really just that. It wasn't meant to be this physically arduous trip. It wasn't meant to be a first, although I don't know of anyone else doing a trip quite like this. It was really meant for interaction.

INTERVIEWER: Besides just having it be a social trip, where you saw a lot of people along the way, did you see anything else that was particularly interesting to you as you paddled along?

ANN BANCROFT: I think towards the end, we were on the St. Lawrence Seaway, an area that, from all the books that we had read and maps that we had looked at, looked to be a pretty nice wild stretch of river to be on. And in fact, it was quite the opposite. It was very populated with cabins and houses and an inordinate amount, in our opinion, of speedboats, which were much more treacherous than the oar boats that we were passing by.

And then traveling down the river, I became a bit dismayed about Styrofoam in particular. There were those Styrofoam peanuts floating every day here and there, not mass quantities but bits of them everywhere. And you become acutely aware of what we produce as a society and how careful we need to be and thinking about how we need to perhaps change some of our behaviors as well as some of our practices.

INTERVIEWER: There wasn't as much media interest in this trip, obviously, and in some of the other adventures. Did that bother you at all?

ANN BANCROFT: Oh, not at all. We don't necessarily do these trips for media interest. Sometimes, it's a nice way to get your message out. Media tends to be pretty interested in firsts. We weren't there to break a record in our kayaks.

We weren't there to experience necessarily the physical difficulties. This was such a departure from that. And I think that's what we've been known for. So it's always maybe six folks out a little bit. And that's OK.