Thanks for the incredible Retreat to Catalina Island. You guys are great!

My wife and I have been on 6 Earthwatch expeditions, and are getting ready for our next with Whooping Cranes on the Texas coast. The others have included catching and banding migrating birds in Hungary, world's biggest bighorn sheep in Gobi Desert of Mongolia, Asian elephant behavior in Thailand, and most recently helping apple growers in the Himalayas adapt to global warming's effect on pollinating insects. You don't have to know much about the research in advance--they teach you what to do and why. Earthwatch team members are volunteers in citizen science, a team of 8-12 people usually observing and counting efforts to assist gathering info in field biology, sociology, archeology, oceanography, and there are projects all over the world in all months. We choose one we can tie to a trip to a foreign country so it's not a separate plane trip halfway around the world. We pay our own expenses (tax deductible), but they provide lodging, meals, opportunity for learning about the area besides the research focus.