Sunday Morning Excitement & Waterproof Boots

We booked this trip thru Vacations to Go, and while searching for bargains in the cruises, booked another trip for next March, and a third trip for next November. It was to be the 4 Continents trip, going from Rome to Florida via Africa and South Americal Trouble was it went into Yellow Fever territory and it wasn't possible to get vacinated so we had to cancel. The cancellation is about 1 year in advance, so no financial loss. The problem was that Vacations to Go mixed up the cancellation notice and informed us they had cancelled the Antarctic trip. Didn't that get the phone busy? We straightened it out in about an hour and now are still officially going to the Antarctic next month.Its a difficult trip to pack for. When we hit Rio temperatures will be in the 80s, but the Antarctic will probably be in the high 30s at best. Experience shows the less you take with you, the easier the flights. Once you hit the ship, you're in heaven. Unpack and forget it. But that paradise is several airports away, and as anyone who has travelled lately knows, the airports are not great places to be going to with lots of luggage. Worse yet, some flights on this trip are on Air Argentina which has a lower weight limit than the US Airlines, so we can't even pack to the US limits. But, the Marco Polo people tell us we will need 10" or higher waterproof boots for the Antarctic landings so when we leap from the Zodiacs into the Antarctic surf on the rocky beaches, our feet and pants won't get soaked and we won't get frostbite or, more likely, real cold, while photographing everything in sight. I got my boots yesterday at the Bootlegger in Garberville. They are beauties, really tall, totally waterproof, and somewhat heavy. My plan is to stuff them with underwear for the flight packing. We'll only need them for about 20 minutes, total, I suspect, but those 20 minutes are quite important. I also got "extreme cold" socks to wear with my boots.Next time perhaps we'll examine my new Olympus 18x zoon digital camera. I'm trying it out now to see how well the image stabalization works when the zoom nears its limits. Unstabalized I can't get past about 7x with my older Olympus and its 10x zoom.