Has anyone else been to the arctic circle? Mine came thanks to Uncle Sam’s Yacht Club. I have a “Blue Nose” card for crossing the circle (similar to the Shellback designation for crossing the equator, which I also have). The initiation for Blue Nose is not as extreme as the Shellback one. It involves the Junior Officer and the Senior enlisted man on board going to the forward bull nose in their underwear and painting it blue with a small brush while underway. Then all other uninitiated crew gets a salt water hose down with a fire hose. Cold times!!! The good news is that everyone gets “medically” treated for exposure with a mixture of everclear and orange juice.
1. Thank you for your selfless service. We all benefit from people like you.
2. Great story!
3. I have been as far south as Accra, Ghana and as far north as Saskatoon now. I am going to travel to Australia in the next year, so that will be much further south than any of my current junkets. I will only go further north if we can break into the European market.
My farthest south was Montevideo. We were supposed to get there after going around Cape Horn from Chili, but we ended up going back through the Panama Canal instead, after escaping a coup in Santiago. The military started bombing Allende’s (spelling?) government as we were pulling into port, claiming that the US Navy nuclear warship was there supporting the coup. We turned around and high tailed it away, back to Panama.
Last edited by TruBlu; 10-29-2021 at 09:24 AM. Reason: Corrected autocorrect.
I've been juuust above the Arctic Circle on land, so no initiation ceremony was had (also, I was 11 or 12 years old, so no "medicine", either). I was in Fort Yukon, Alaska, in the dead of winter (high school basketball season for my siblings, actually). I think there were about six hours of daylight at that time of year. They gain and lose more than 7 minutes of daylight every day there. Also, although there were streets in town, they were actually just compacted snow, and I didn't recall seeing a car moving while we were there. If you wanted to go somewhere in town, you walked, and if you wanted to go somewhere out of town, you took a snowmobile. Getting there was the only time I've ever ridden in a ski plane, so it was all pretty memorable. We won both games, too.
I've never been below the equator, sadly. In fact, I think the farthest south I've ever been isSan AntonioMiami.
Last edited by Phredd3; 10-29-2021 at 10:30 AM. Reason: I forgot that I went to Miami when I was very young.
I too have been to Reykjavik, but my furthest point north is the small Icelandic port town of Husavik (the purported "whale watching capital of Europe"), which is a couple of degrees further north than Reykjavik (66 degrees, as opposed to 64 for Reykjavik).
Husavik is also...not ugly.
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I got just above the arctic circle in Norway years ago. No special ceremony, alas.
-jk
I thought Anchorage was the furthest north I had been, but it turns out that it was Reykjavik by a few degrees.
Surprised with all the world travelers here nobody has stayed at the La Quinta at the edge of earth.