This is Patriot Hills camp, located at 81 degrees latitude and 81 degrees longitude!  The camp can hold up to 60 people at a time, including staff.  During our visit, the camp had, on average, 25 visitors in addition to the 20 or so staff that are based at camp.  So it was a relatively full house.   The blue tent is the library tent, where you could go and sit at a table and read or play games.  The rest of these tents are all residence tents for guests.

This is the dining and cooks tent, which is the main gathering place for everyone during the day.  The dining tent is actually pretty warm and very large, and there was always food and drink available.  The food was excellent.  There were two chefs - one from Scotland and one from New Zealand and they were both very good.  They served us a lot of soups, stews and carbohydrates to help us keep warm.  And there was always chocolate or a Kit-Kat bar for a snack.  

You can also see some other tents - the mechanics tent which is the red tent in the back, and on the right of the picture is the staff tent and the radio tent.  You can kind of see the antennas for the various different radios that they use.  The radio operator keeps track of everyone that ANI brings to the continent (every climber, skier, and explorer must have a radio or Iridium phone and call in their positions at least once a day) and monitors the weather throughout the continent for various different teams.  The radio operator also doubles as air traffic control for the five planes that are flown in and out of the snow runway at Patriot Hills.    
    

This was our home on the seventh continent.  We had a tent that was big enough for the two of us.  The tent was on boards and we each had a box spring and mattress to sleep on.  As you can see, the tent is not very dark, so this was the light we slept in every night.   In addition, the tent did not keep out noise and rattled in the wind, so there was rarely a quiet night's sleep.  The temperature in the tent was pretty good - it was probably 50 - 55 degrees if the tent flaps were closed for a long time.  When we woke up in the morning, everything was warm except for those things that weren't in our sleeping bags - noses and ears. 
 

There is no plumbing in Antarctica.  All waste, including human waste, is shipped back to Chile for disposal.  So the bathroom facilities are rather primitive.  This is the Urinal - one for the men and one for the women.  You basically pee in a bucket and then pour it into a barrel which is sealed up and frozen before it is loaded onto the plane back to Chile.   

On the other side of this tent were two other rooms that you could use for cleaning - in lieu of showers.  They had a thermos of hot water and a bowl and you could bring your tooth brush or towel and wash yourself in there.  Unfortunately, those rooms were a little cold - probably 45 or 50 degrees - so you really didn't feel like taking off much clothing.  And at some point you are so dirty it doesn't really matter anymore!! 
 

And then there were the "rooms" known as the Ice Toilette or more affectionately as the "poo igloo."  It was very cold in these toilettes, so people went in and took care of business rather quickly.  Again, there were buckets with trash bags in them and they were closed up, frozen and taken back to Chile on the plane. 

This is the inside of the dining tent.  You can see that there are people in here without coats on.  It got pretty warm in the tent, which is why we spent a lot of time there.  The woman in the red pants is Fran who was head of client relations in camp.  She was responsible for making sure that everything ran smoothly while we were there.  Fran has worked on the ice for the last seven years and in the off season works as a caterer in the UK. 

One of the field guides, who spends his summer months in the Arctic with the Eskimos, built an igloo early on in the season.  This igloo was made of big blocks but the snow had blown for two months on the igloo and filled in all of the cracks.  You can see the saw and the machete that were used to cut the snow blocks right by the front door.

We spent one night sleeping in the igloo.  While it wasn't warm, it wasn't as cold as we were expecting and it was incredibly quiet.  You couldn't heard any of the general camp noise, or the sound of the wind blowing all night.   This was key because planes would fly in and out of camp at all hours - the benefit of it being light 24 hours.