(WGHP) — At the end of their lives, many people look back and lament not doing more interesting things. We’re pretty confident that Lindsey Auman won’t be among those people.
She’s a professional life coach and yoga instructor who, along with her husband, Frank, is getting more out of life than almost any half-dozen folks you can point to.
“Frank and I, our very first weekend that we took a trip together, we made a list while we were driving,” of the places they’d love to go, Lindsey said. “And we have been slowly going through that and checking off…in the coffee table book, we put a picture of us if we’ve done the thing in the list.”
Lindsey made that coffee table book as a Christmas gift to celebrate their first year together. The left page lists the location, and the right page is a generic photo of it since they hadn’t been to any of them yet. When they do go, they put photos and other memorabilia between those pages.
“When I turned 40 a few years ago, we I wanted to hike Kilimanjaro…once we did that together, we learned we loved…once we really trained for it and then did it together…nature and hiking.”
But not all nature hikes are created equal. This past year, the Aumans went on a hike to the south pole. Let’s get the obvious questions out of the way first:
“It’s cold. With that said, it’s a dry cold. So our cold here, I feel it more because the humidity makes it like sink into your bones,” she said.
Lindsey then proceeded to show us the pictures of the four layers of winter clothing they wore in Antarctica which, by the way, is more picturesque than you might imagine.
“There are mountains there,” she said. “There’s actually a mountain range there, and the mountain range itself is about a third the height of Everest. So it’s not a small mountain range, but we just see the tops of it because the ice itself is about a mile-and-half thick.”
The other views aren’t always what you might imagine.
“It doesn’t look like ice or Antarctica or snow. It looks like the ocean, the way the water has frozen ripples in it, and just you’re up high, and it just looks like you’re looking at a 360-degree ocean all around you,” she said.
The South Pole may not be the first place you think of going on vacation in the dead of winter. But Lindsey says in her professional mission statement that she wants to inspire others to live their best lives. Being an adventurer completes that for her.
“I love knowing I’m this person who is…wearing makeup and has her hair…and gets to live a really, really lovely cushy life and has a fluffy cat,” she said. “And I’m also one of the 500 people this year that were at the South Pole. I like knowing that.”
The trips have also lead to what she hopes are lifelong friendships. They were there when another couple from Europe got engaged, and they’ll be going to their wedding later this year.
“You can find so much connection if you’re put in a situation together, and you’re going through it and doing it and out of your comfort zone together,” Lindsey said.
See what it looks like to be in Antarctica in this edition of The Buckley Report.
