I’m headed to Australia next year for the trip of a lifetime. Seriously. I’ve wanted to go since I was six.

Over the intervening years I’ve made some Aussies friends (while they were here on exchange) and wouldn’t you know it, one of them is getting hitched in September 2008 so Down Under here I come!

But after that I’ve decided where I’d like to go next, thanks to this article on geek vacations from Wired.

It’s not to Chernobyl (though I am of Ukrainian descent), and it’s not even to CERN particle accelerator (though that would be awesome–maybe if I ever make it to Switzerland), and I’ve already been to Palo Alto (well, San Jose, but Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley).

No, after Australia I’d like my next major trip to be a working vacation to McMurdo Station in Antarctica, with perhaps an extended stay at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

I’m completely serious.

It would be an amazing experience and how many people could say they’ve been to the bottom of the planet? To my mind, it’s one of the few places on Earth (maybe the deep Sahara being another) where it would be so alien and so inhospitable to life as we know it that that would be almost like being on another planet.

Think about it–six months of sunlight, six of darkness. -60 oC temperatures, snow blindness, ice 2 km thick…It would be cool! (no pun intended).

And maybe I could get a US Antarctic Program’s Artists and Writers’ Program grant like Kim Stanley Robinson did…

– S.