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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (65840)	11/17/2004 8:11:00 AM
From: Crocodile	Respond to of 71178

minus 40 degrees? Yep, sure thing. It gets cold in plenty of areas up here. I was just checking the weather records for up around Thunder Bay and they have a minimum record of around -50 F or perhaps a little colder. Up further north in places like Baker Lake, they've had records colder than that and far colder when you include wind chill factor. Out here we whine when it hits +40. brrr Yep, I've seen some of that wimpy attitude towards the cold when travelling in more southern climes. I like to swim in rivers, so if I'm somewhere and the water looks clean and warm enough, I'll just wade in and start swimming around in my shorts and t-shirt. Sometimes I get some pretty nervous looks from the local denizens when I go in and start doing laps in a river when people are wandering by in their parkas. One time, I was swimming along a river in N. California and swam up to a couple of people in parkas who were tossing sticks into the edge of the water for their dog to fetch. They were worried about their dog getting more than its feet wet as it was "so cold". I'd been swimming for about 20 minutes or so and wasn't even feeling the chill. The people were screeching and hooting at me asking how I could stand the cold. I laughed because the water was warmer than it ever gets even in summer in the river where I grew up. Btw, around here, one of the things people do to raise money for charities is to hold annual Polar Bear events in some of the towns. These are usually on New Year's Day, which is often one of the colder days of the year. To prepare for the event, a couple of people take chainsaws and cut through the ice on a nearby river (most towns have a river flowing through or nearby). They remove a big chunk of thick ice so that there is a "swimming pool" in the river, and then people who have collected pledges, come down and join hands and run and jump in the river at a certain time on New Year's Day. There are usually quite a few who come down in their bathing suits and jump in, and sometimes a few more get into the spirit of the occasion and hop in too. Plenty of others come to watch and cheer for the leapers. There's usually a pancake breakfast after. People who jump in should be in good shape as there's usually one or two somewhere who take heart attacks from the shock of diving into the cold water. Just some good Winter fun. Mr. Croc and I don't give in to winter too easily. We often wear our shorts out and about until January 1st. Mr. Croc often has a little friendly competition going with a certain courier driver that we see regularly -- a guy who wears his uniform shorts until part way through winter. Mr. Croc usually wins in lasting the longest at continuing to wear shorts when the temperatures really start to dive and the snow starts to blow. Makes everyone really annoyed when we are wandering around in our shorts on a snowy day. However, when I was a university up here, a lot of people did that -- it's kind of a reverse psychology thing. If you dress like its summer and just keep on keeping on, it actually seems to make you feel better -- as though you won't let winter get to you. It's not the cold so much as the snow and the whiteness that bugs me the most. Sometimes you just start getting sick of it around the middle of February. I do a lot of snowshoeing into marshes to visit beaver lodges, check out the nests in heron colonies, and do some wildlife tracking to kill boredom -- or do winter hiking up on the Shield where the snow tends to be less deep in the forests up on the high ridges. Sometimes though, it's nice to get to some place warm to see insects, lizards, fish and so on. I usually go to the desert somewhere, but seems that these days, most of my friends are going to Cuba and some to Belize or Costa Rica. I've been giving some thought to going to Ecuador -- friends keep telling me that I'll be blown away by the birds and insects down there. When I travel, it's mainly to study wildlife, so perhaps that will be the new destination to do some wandering when I get sick of the snow and cold. croc