TRAVEL TALES

Young Chang

We said “oh my gosh” and smiled as we looked at a vacation photo of

the Cashions and the Fromes holding a recent issue of the Daily Pilot at

the North Pole.

One of the front-page pieces was an Orange County Fair story I had

written in July with a big photo taken by my photographer friend. He and

I laughed -- our story had traveled all the way to the home of Kris

Kringle.

We’ve seen our bylines in Africa before -- in Switzerland, Argentina,

China and Hawaii too. But the top of the world made us giggle.

The trip started when Newport Beach friends John and Marcia Cashion

and Wally and Mary Frome found a brochure about a tour group to the North

Pole.

“We were looking for things a little bit offbeat and different,” John

Cashion said. “We’re old friends, and we had gone to the Antarctic

together too, so we’ve now been to the Antarctic and the North Pole.”

An important difference between the North and South poles, the

travelers explained, is that one is a continent and one is not.

The North Pole is frozen ocean surrounded by land. The South Pole is

on the Antarctic continent and is surrounded by ocean.

The group flew to Norway from California in mid-July and caught a

charter flight to a Norwegian island where they boarded a Russian

helicopter. The chopper ferried them out to a ship called the Russian

Nuclear Period Ice Breaker, which guided the two couples to the spot of

frozen water considered the North Pole.

Travel guides set up a barbecue on a sheet of ice and the tourists ate

and drank, while some went for a polar dip.

“They jumped in the water and got right back out again,” said Cashion,

a retired real estate developer.

The weather was about 32 degrees Fahrenheit, which was right around

freezing. The scene contained endless sheets of ice, interrupted only by

ice ridges and windblown ice flecks. And as far as Marcia Cashion could

see, there was only white.

“I loved just looking out and seeing nothing but the ice and the water

and no asphalt and traffic lights,” the 64-year-old said.

John Cashion added that his thrill lay simply in being there -- at the

northernmost tip of the world.

Wally Frome, a semiretired real estate developer, explained why this

was a big deal.

“In all of history, there have only been 5,000 people that have stood

at the pole and another 5,000 that went by submarine,” he said.

* Have you, or someone you know, gone on an interesting vacation

recently? Tell us your adventures. Drop us a line to Travel Tales, 330 W.

Bay St., Costa Mesa, CA 92627; e-mail [email protected]; or fax to

(949) 646-4170.