Ice without snow, but it has been very cold here in Georgia

When we moved to Georgia a little more than three years ago, I don't know exactly what I expected.

Ice City Peachtree

It wasn't this.

I was expecting we would actually have four different seasons, and that the temperature would drop below freezing -- especially at night -- in the winter months.

I certainly never thought temperatures would drop so low that the waterfall out at the entrance would freeze completely solid.

The waterfall was turned off a couple of times that first winter, and I imagine they would have turned it off this time except that the cold weather apparently took them by surprise.

Earlier this week, the overnight temperature got down to single digits. Nearly everything froze, although the little pond waterfall up the street from us apparently kept running. Oddly enough, today the temperature reached the high forties in the late afternoon but the fountain remained frozen.

Tomorrow it's supposed to rain -- and reach the fifties -- so the ice will probably be gone. My guess is it won't get this cold again for the rest of the winter. Still, it's nice to have had at least a little real winter weather.

***

If there's a place in the world I had never heard of, and will never visit, but would love it, it has to be Hammerfest, Norway.

It's a seven-hour flight from Paris, and I learned about it in one of Bill Bryson's wonderful travel books. "Neither Here, Nor There" found Bryson retracing a trip he had made 20 years earlier as a student, and he went to Hammerfest because he wanted to see the Northern Lights.

The only problem with the Aurora Borealis is that it can't be scheduled. There is no way of knowing for sure when and where it will happen, and despite being in the northernmost city in Europe, at 70 degrees north latitude, he had to wait more than three weeks before they made an appearance.

Actually, though, there's a good chance that people far south of Hammerfest will get to see the Northern Lights tonight. There was a massive solar flare Tuesday that sent millions of charged particles toward the Earth.

According to some reports, the Lights could be visible as far south as Boston or Cleveland tonight. When I heard this, I thought of my daughter Pauline. She has told me one of the things she wants to see most in the world is the Aurora Borealis. She's in Jamaica, so she won't see them this time. Knowing her, though, shewill find a way to see them someday.