Buyer Beware Winter Travel Destinations
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So you're happily planning your holidays in winter travel destinations. Fine, but which winter? I know that it's half a century since you learned about the Northern and Southern hemispheres, and you may have forgotten. Winter where you live is Summer in the other hemisphere.
I migrated to Australia on the ten pound assisted passage, which worked out at two and a half pounds sterling for each member of our family. We got off in Perth, and the ship then sailed on to South Australia. When it reached its destination it was a little over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. So one family returned immediately to the UK.
Perhaps they hadn't read their contract. Perhaps they didn't know that they would have to pay thousands of pounds for the full commercial fare to Australia and the same amount to return to the UK. But here's the joke - it wasn't even summer. It was the middle of autumn, so it wasn't really hot yet.
So if you are planning to escape the Alaskan winter for a Queensland winter - forget it. You will arrive in a Queensland summer, probably about 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Oh, all the hotels have air-conditioning which you can probably turn down to as low as 70F.
But it won't be much of a holiday if you stay in your hotel all the time. An hotel in Queensland looks like an hotel in your home town. Each room is a sort of box shape with a door or two and a window or two. So if you want to stay in an hotel room, you'll find one that is pleasantly warm in your home town, and you can imagine the rest.
I wanted a winter holiday to escape the terrible heat of the North coast of Australia. A Scottish winter that is. I was very disappointed that we didn't get any significant snowfall that year in Scotland, though not half as disappointed as the ski resorts.
Another thing you should know if you have forgotten all you learned at school about averages. If you drive down the road so as to miss vehicles parked the average distance from the verge by just one inch, you will crash into the next vehicle that is parked further out.
When you study up the weather details for your winter travel destinations don't just read the average temperature. The average daily top temperature here in Perth in January is 90F which is quite comfortable, as the rest of the day is cooler. The highest maximum is 116F which I don't consider to be comfortable. It might cool down to a hundred during the night before warming up to another day of the heatwave.
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