Expidite the expidited

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I am headed to the passport office this AM to get a new passport. I didn't have time to do the expidited renewal after getting back from Japan. So I made an special expiditing appointment with the passport folks in Atlanta. I am glad I only have to drive into Atlanta, not fly up to NY or Washington DC. It seems I have had to do some expiditing everytime I have renewed my passport. Passports are good for 10 years. When you get a new passport it is a time to ponder where you will be and what the passport will look like in 10 years. The pic belows shows the wear on my now cancelled passport. it was a 50 page book (the extra pages version) and 46 pages are fully used. Many countries require 3 empty pages to enter their country. So, I got full use of the larger size passport. If you need more pages, you send the passport in and they will "sew-in" more pages. The thickest passport I ever saw was at the Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan border. A truck driver I saw had a Uzbekistan passpo...

Hopefully the folks who wanted to see me on the webcam did. Now I have to see if steering the camera for my personal amusement will get me in trouble. The picture of the buiding is what I was looking at for the webcam (the other side of the lens). It is the NOAA building. I am not going to tell you what the sign I was next to said. You have to come to the pole yourself. Ok. Ok... it says basically "No vehicles past this point" There are a lot of buried wires that the comms tech doesn't like to have to splice.

We have been reminded here that it was 95 years ago today 1/17/12 that Scott arrived at 90 South. Upon seeing Amundsen’s tent his words: “The Pole….Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority….Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. I wonder if we can do it”. It is a good time to reflect on the heroic age of polar exploration.

There is a whole bunch of nothing out there.

The pole is a lot different from McMurdo. The culture is different. The place is different. The culture here is of a very large deep field camp. Pole people naturally pitch in. Pole peolple understand the harshness of Antarctica. Pole people know each other a lot better than folks at McMurdo.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Charles,
Check your email.
GM

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