100 and Done! (Countries that is...)

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We are back! This last trip brought the total countries visited to 100! It is a crazy milestone. It is difficult, time-consuming and can be (IS) expensive. After I got back from Antarctica in 2007, I started thinking about it. After 2010 I was thinking about it more (as I moved from NY to Georgia) and in 2014 it had become a real goal. Between Angie and I we have been to 109 Countries. We are tied at 100 countries each. We have 9 countries different in our lists. For example, I have been to San Marino. She has not. She has been to Israel. I have not, yet. There has been some fun competition in this area. That's why we had to establish rules. 1.) Must be listed (as a country) with the US State Department 2.) Being in an airport doesn't count. You have to get through immigration somehow and not in a DMZ or a no-mans-land 3.) A passport stamp is not required. I have been to Canada, Paraguay, and Uruguay without getting my passport stamped. There are friendly borders in many places...
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I am in LA. I missed my connection. I did manage to get the red-eye out tonight. So it looks like I get to spend another night on a plane. I slept last night. I probably got 4 or 5 hours of sleep. I caught up with a fellow ice person last night for the flight. We were recounting the experience. Our experiences and impressions were very similar. He was saying that he can't describe a lot of it. He went on to say that even looking at his photos, they didn't tell what he was experiencing. We agreed about how strange it was meeting the winter-overs we were taking over for when we got there in October. "They had that weird stare and they talked ok and everything but there was no emotional content to what they were saying". There is a zombie like quality to some people who spend a lot of time on the ice.

After a couple of weeks at pole he was medivaced to McMurdo for altitude sickness (there were quite a few this year). It got better and went back to pole. This guy is a body builder and you wouldn't expect anything to bring that guy down.

This is a picture I took day-before-yesterday of some fata-morgana. Fata-morgana is Antarctican for mirage. This is looking across about 40 miles of sea-ice. The temperature inversion causes this really cool elongations and inversions. I have seen small mountains upside down. It is pretty freaky when you are walking into work and you see these things.

I have taken and saved about 35 GB of photos and videos. I have not sorted through many of them myself. It will take quite a while.

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