Summer, 2009 Until just a few days before I arrived, the San Francisco Zoo had been the proud home of a committed, monogamous pair of male penguins named Harry and Pepper. They’d moved in to a burrow together a year or so before, and incubated and fussed over first a wooden egg, then a real...

So we were in the women's bathroom on a World War II naval carrier, looking for ghosts, and for a minute there it looked like we had one cornered.

Sometimes you’re tootling along on your way to some great and wonderful adventure and the road opens before you and (to quote the poet Browning) the lark is on the wing and the snail’s on the thorn and you think, not so badly done, life. Not bad at all.

Happy 2012, Field Trip Podcast friends! We're back from our holiday break, we have wiped the sleep out of our eyes and gotten the crumbs out of our hair, and we're back to work on Series 2.