It's 8:00 in the morning and still pitch black outside. A couple inches of snow fell overnight. As it melts, it falls to the deck from the boom in wet sheets accompanied by heavy thumps. The sun will not rise for more than an hour, so until then we can't see how much snow has accumulated ashore or how much whiter the mountains are than yesterday. We're still a month away from mid-winter, and we're down to a bit over eight hours of daylight officially. But with the high mountains that border the city of Ushuaia to the north of us, our effective hours of daylight are really only from about 10:00 until 4:30. We'll lose another hour of light in just over a month on the shortest day of the year. In terms of daylight hours, wintering here in Ushuaia can be compared to wintering in Sitka, Alaska.

We returned ten days ago from a three-week whirlwind visit to the United States. We hardly have enough time to get over the cultural shock of being back in the US during such a short visit. Before we traveled extensively, we had thought that culture shocks were one way - that we would experience them in other cultures but not when returning to our own. In fact, we expect things to be different in different countries, so while we observe and generally enjoy each country's idiosyncrasies, they rarely shock us. We accept what comes, and though we might wonder at why a country works (or not) the way it does, we are only surprised by the differences if we have very strong preconceptions about a country before we arrive. For us, the real shock comes when we return to our own country and see it in light of the other places we have visited. The very places we grew up in and know best seem alien and strange, not because they have changed that much, but because our perceptions and expectations have been changed by the places we have visited.

This first struck us when we were living in Sweden before we went sailing. Back in the late 1980s, Sweden was a very homogenous country, and the population was white and Northern European. The first time we returned to the States, we had seen nothing but white faces and Scandinavian body types - moderately tall, relatively thin - for more than six months. Upon disembarking at JFK airport, we were immediately surrounded by people of every conceivable color, shape and size. We hadn't even left the airport before the diversity of our native country all but overwhelmed us.

Each time we travel back to the US, something else strikes us as particularly wonderful, odd or scary. No other country in the world offers the same level of customer service and convenience. Few other countries function as well when it comes to basic industrial infrastructure - roads, telecoms, power and water. We turn on a light switch and expect to get power; we open a tap and expect to get water; we log in on our computer and expect to access the Internet; we pick up the phone and expect to be able to place a call to anywhere in the world. We are virtually never disappointed in these expectations. In La Paz in Mexico, the water is only turned on four days a week as the aquifer that serves the city slowly fills with saltwater. In Playa del Coco in Costa Rica, the power was out about a third of the time we were there as the region's growth outpaced its electrical infrastructure. Here in Argentina, the cell phone system is so overloaded that most incoming international calls do not get through. While our country must come to grips with many complex problems in everything from health care to education, as Americans we take it for granted that our country works at a basic level - a luxury the majority of people in the world will never know.

Such realizations make us feel blessed by what is considered normal in our country. But we are uncomfortable with other things that at least some Americans seem to take for granted. After 9/11, we were taken aback by the blind assumption America could invade anyone it pleased or change any government it disliked, an attitude implicit in many of the discussions we heard on (conservative and liberal) talk radio programs and even over the dinner table from before our invasion of Afghanistan until well after our invasion of Iraq. We have never heard similar discussions in any other country in the world. Only the US has the military wherewithal, the self-confidence - and the arrogance - to not only discuss "regime change" but to actually put it into practice. On another occasion when friends visited from Sweden, they were shocked to find out that there were children in the US who did not have access to the most basic health care, let alone sophisticated treatments for diseases like cancer. "But that's barbaric!" our friends said.

On this last visit to the States, the thing that most struck us was much more mundane. We were shocked by how much time we had to spend in a car "running errands." While shopping convenience has been brought close to the level of a science in the US, that does not extend to minimizing car travel time. Malls bring together lots of stores to make shopping a one-stop affair, but unlike in most of the rest of the world, most do not include the stores we need from day to day: grocery stores, dry cleaners, post offices, banks, hardware stores, liquor stores, office supply stores, and so on. These all seem to be located at some distance from one another, usually in suburban strip malls, requiring separate stops and a tremendous amount of wasted time driving, finding parking and going to and from the car. Over the course of three weeks in the States, we must have spent the equivalent of a 40-hour work week in a car going from store to store, running errands and tracking down things we needed to take back to the boat. Using public transit for these errands is not an option - where it is available at all it does not go to the places we need to reach. This is not a change from our previous visits, but with gas prices pushing $4 per gallon it struck us more forcibly than it ever had before.

When we lived in Europe, all of the stores we needed on a regular basis were located in a small neighborhood shopping area within walking distance of our apartment. This was similar to Main Street in the small town where my father grew up, a Main Street which has since succumbed to malls and mega-grocery stores outside of town. Everywhere we have visited by boat - except the US and, surprisingly, New Zealand - we have been able to do all the shopping and errands we needed to do on foot or using public transportation. Returning from the grocery store after a big shop, we often do use taxis, which are plentiful and inexpensive ($3-5 for a trip within town).

Living aboard a boat and sailing around the world stretches and challenges us, which is one of the main reasons why we continue to find it satisfying after more than a dozen years. In extreme moments - a storm at sea, a grounding in Iceland - we have been forced up against what we had thought were our absolute limits, and we have had to fight through those limits rather than giving in to them. Those moments have changed us forever. But other, major, changes come from the slow accretion of experience, the wearing away of our prejudices and preconceptions, and - in some cases - our most strongly held beliefs. Traveling does broaden understanding, but it also sharpens and deepens it. By knowing how things work elsewhere, we can envision more options and choices, we can dare to believe in different ways of doing things. The trick is bringing that back home with us again.

May you see with new eyes, if only for a little while, Beth and Evans s/v Hawk