The GCW Tour, Sydney & New Zealand: Seven, or, Is It Still an Accomplishment If You Didn't Really Have to Work for It?

So after a day spent mostly sleeping, lamenting the loss of my relatively new prescription sunglasses (which went into my bag in Seattle but were not in my bag in Sydney), and wandering between the Sydney Opera House and the Harbor Bridge, I'm back in my very funky hotel.

A word to the wise: when renting a room above a pub, do not expect quiet -- especially if it's eighty degrees out, so everyone's on the sidewalk and all the windows are open.

Ah well. Given my need for sleep these days, I doubt the revelers will keep me up.

Anyway, I wanted to take this opportunity to conduct a brief year in review:

Last March, I was in Vietnam, which is in ASIA.
In June, the niece and I went to Spain, which is in EUROPE.
We also took a quick jaunt to Morocco, which is in AFRICA.
In August, my foodie friends and I went to Napa, which is in NORTH AMERICA.
November took me to Argentina, which is in SOUTH AMERICA.
And, of course, I went to Argentina so I could catch the cruise to Antartica which is in, well, ANTARCTICA.
Now it's February and I'm sitting here in Sydney, which is in Australia and OCEANIA.

So in the span of a single year, while working a full(ish) time job and being treated for cancer, I managed to step foot on all seven continents. I'm strangely pleased about this. 

Admittedly, it's sort of a stupid thing to list among one's "accomplishments," in that achieving it really only required three things: desire,  money, and an accommodating boss (thanks boss!). There are a lot of things that a lot of people do on a daily basis that actually takes way more work than going on a few trips. Say, for example, running a 5K,or learning a new language, or how to play a musical instrument. 

In short, there are way more things that require way more dedication and effort than throwing a dart at a map.

But I'm not going to be running any 5Ks (I'll be walking the Mercer Island Half), and I don't see taking up the piano or Swahili anytime soon. 

So instead I'm going to be satisfied with the knowledge that I've done something that, easy as it is (for someone with a good employer and first world resources), very few people have actually done. 

Antarctica tourism didn't really start until the early 90s, and current estimates are that about 40,000 people a year make the trip. Forty thousand times 25 is basically a million people. We should add a few score thousand for all the scientists and military personnel that have been to Antarctica, and then drop a few score thousand for all the Antarctica tourists who still have a continent or two to go. Let's just call it a million. A million people out of the 7.125 billion currently estimated to populate the planet plus the 1.4 billion that have died over the last 25 years.

That seems a pretty rare group. Not "people who have been President" rare or "people who have seen the Loch Ness Monster" rare, but still, rare enough that I'm going to consider it an accomplishment.

We all need our thing, I guess. So yay me.