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Merry Christmas
Saturday, December 25, 1999
 Tejas | |
 Hear Vern's Call from Aconcagua |
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Merry Christmas, Mountain Zone. This is Vernon Tejas with Alpine Ascents' Team Millennium Climb, reporting in from the Base Camp of Aconcagua. Boy has it been a wonderful Christmas, we've been bathing, we've been cleaning, we've been eating and we even made gifts and exchanged them at dinner tonight, man was that fun. I got the bungee cord of my life tonight [laughter in background]. And everyone else I think got something else that was as equally satisfying.
We've just had a wonderful meal and finished it off with cheese cake and chocolate mouse pie. Oh my goodness, cheers, cheers, cheers to our excellent pastry chef, that would be Allan of course. You know he cooks, and he loves the outdoors as well, [laughter in background] and he's single.
Tomorrow, we're going to move up bright and early to Camp I, weather permitting. Everybody seems to be acclimatizing fairly well. They were still a little rocky the first couple of days, but now I think we're starting to get into the groove. And we're anticipating that the wind is going to drop. We can see now blowing the clouds off the top of the mountain for the last couple of days, and we're going to move up to Camp I and hopefully the wild animals haven't eaten all our food up there that we left the day before. And we'll be able to then get into position for our higher camp at the base of the Polacas Glacier. Not only that, but you wouldn't believe the paparazzi here, it's phenomenal. We have so many cameras flashing that I think I'm getting a suntan with just the flash alone. Well, fortunately for me, I brought along some SPF 40, so I'll be smearing that all over my body in the next couple of days.
To you all out there in the big world, Merry Christmas to you and Ciao for now from Argentina. Bye-bye.
—Vernon Tejas, MountainZone.com Correspondent
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