Canada + U.S. In A Deep Freeze

Even European News agencies have been picking up on it: Most of Canada and the continental United States are in a deep freeze stretching from the very far north of the continent to as far south as  Florida and the southern most tip of Texas. The temperatures shown here are for Florida’s Panhandle but are not going to be much different farther south in the state. While we are having “balmy” 32F on Tuesday, Chicago,IL just got famous by having lower temperatures than Siberia. While most of Canada is experiencing these frigid temps every winter, the southern states of the U.S. are feeling this kind of weather is going to have a huge impact on their daily lives. Some schools have decided to stay closed even though that makes me wonder how students would be holding up in say Winnipeg, Manitoba where winter temps are down to –40F every year. Ok, let’s switch to more pleasant things. Yesterday evening we got an unexpected call on SKYPE. It was my long-time friend’s wife, Renate. Hermann and Renate are living in northern Australia near the city of Darwin. However, the call did not come from there. Nope, it was coming from a hotel in the city of Huey, Vietnam, where Renate had positioned herself on a balcony overlooking the tropical city. Hermann and his wife are currently on a backpack trip through Vietnam. They use trains for transportation and we were told that they would take a 12hr. train ride back to the city of Hanoi the day after. What an undertaking! Hermann and I go back a long time to 1975, when we attended the same technical college course in the city of Flensburg, Schleswig Holstein. We graduated at the same time and while I was heading to Norway, Hermann and Renate emigrated to Australia. After some time in the south of the country they did a long dusty move through the Australian Outback to the Northern Territory, where they regularly “enjoy” temperatures from 80 to 95F (28-35C) In that area the temps are coming with an extremely high humidity, and all I can say it would be hard to live there for me. We hope that we will soon hear more of the couple as they have another 7 days before heading back to their home in Australia. Yesterday we did some more exploring in our neighbourhood. We tried to find a place for a longer hike, but found this type of prohibitive sign. It can be found in front of every little public road branching off Hwy 20. At the shoreline of the Bayou we found this sign, which sure would prevent ME from going for a swim there.   We also went to the Rocky Bayou State Park to get our holding tanks emptied. It’s a 12-mile drive. The park is very beautiful and offers nice camping facilities. 2 hosts are making sure the place stays neat and tidy. It also offers several hiking trails.   Thanks for dropping by!