John Wayne and Antarctica

                                    It is a fact that the coldest temperature ever recorded is on the East Antarctic Plateau and that temperature is a whopping minus 144 degrees Fahrenheit!

                                    So why in the name of all that’s freezer-burned are you traveling down that way at this time of year? It’s almost Christmas, it’s snowing here, and the days are getting shorter and shorter!

                                    I’m glad you asked that Mr. Popsicle!

                        Remember, everything down here is reversed! The Winter in the Southern Hemisphere starts on June 21^st, and the summer starts on December 21^st! Which means that our brains are going kerflooey with trying to wrap themselves around the fact that we usually associate DecemBrrrrr……… with COLD! But here we are only a few days away from what is usually the shortest daylight day of the year, and now we’re experiencing another Longest Day! (We already had ours back in June, so this is quite the treat, and we feel very selfish that we get TWO of these days this year!)

                        By the time that we round Cape Horn at a latitude 56 degrees SOUTH latitude (the equivalent spot up north is Copenhagen, Denmark and Omsk, Russia) so you can see that as far south as we are, there’s still plenty of distance to cover before we’d hit the South Pole.

Now, to give you a bit of perspective…. the tip of Cape Horn is as far away from the South Pole as NYC is from San Francisco! But….. the Drake Passage is only around 600 miles wide, so in theory, Cape Horn is only 600 miles from the nearest part of Antarctica which makes it a little easier for “Explorer” type passenger ships to bring fare-paying Adventure Passengers to Antarctica! (I am trying to convince the Captain to blow off the rest of the Itinerary and take us there so that we can ‘March with the Penguins’!

                        I can see the headlines now…… 3500 travelers stranded at the bottom of the world after crazed passenger hijacks the Majestic Princess in order to “get to Antarctica!”

                        My daughter Lorelyn once told me that one of her criteria for deciding whether to do something (or not!) was how was it going to read in the morning papers…..

Hmm….maybe we could just do a “drive-by”?

By the time that you read this we will have experienced our Longest Daylight Day. It was yesterday and we had an excursion to some volcanoes and waterfalls in Puerto Varas, Chile. To give you a brief preview all I will say is that it was Magnificent(!) and that that particular Post is just waiting to be written, all of the photos have been assembled and are just itching to be shown…… soon!

            It was still daylight when I went to bed last night and it’s almost daylight now, so I’d better get a move on here… in the immortal words of John Wayne,

 “C’mon boys, we’re burnin’ daylight!”

And as much of that as we have, I don’t want to waste one little minute!