Mid-Winter...

Today is the the winter solstice down here. The shortest day, the longest night. From now on the days will get longer as we head towards spring. Currently we have a little less than 4 hours of sunlight a day, although we never actually see the sun as it never makes it above the glacier these days. Dawn or twilight for a few hours a day, take your pick. But the fact that we get any light at all during the Antarctic winter makes all of us here feel very fortunate.


There is a tradition in Antarctica that all the stations that have winterover crews take a midwinter picture and send it to all the other crews on the continent on the day of the solstice. So far we've received pictures from the other American bases, several Australian and Russian bases, Chilean, Korean, and Indian bases. We'll get more throughout the day, and I hope to be able to do a post with all of them sometime. It's pretty special. In my last post I showed the pic we took here at Palmer, but wanted to show you the final one we sent out to all the other stations.


Another tradition on winter solstice is to have a really nice dinner. I thought I'd include our menu for solstice dinner so that you can see what a harsh, harsh continent this is ;-)... I think I'm going to break out my Sunday go to meeting Hawaiian shirt for it.


Finally, there are a couple of tequila aficionados down here, our chef Kristen included. We used our connections (please? pretty please?) to have somebody bring down a bottle of Don Julio 1942 on the last ship, and we're going to sip some of that tonight as well. Again, it's a harsh place!

Our chef, Kristen and me. She's in her bathrobe because she just did a polar plunge after the last ship left.



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