Arkansas City ? Not too many people can say they’ve been to Antarctica.

But the world’s coldest and loneliest continent seems to have a connection to Crowley County in southern Kansas.

Several county residents have been attracted Antarctica over the years, including Arkansas City mayor Dotty Smith, who recently returned from a cruise that had to change course because of bad weather.

“We did get to see the cruise ship, Explorer II, the sister ship to Explorer (which sank last year when after hitting an iceberg),” Smith said. “Disappointingly, winter weather had set in early and we could not travel further south.”

Several other residents have made it all the way to the southernmost continent.

Though a popular tourist spot in recent years, few people go to Antarctica to work. Travel there is by ship or plane and can often be dangerous, and winters are often brutal, with temperatures dropping below minus-100 degree Fahrenheit.

Dennis Rittenhouse, who runs a radio repair shot in Udall, learned about Antarctica’s winters when working there as en electrician at McMurdo Station in McMurdo Sound next to the Ross Ice Shelf. McMurdo is the largest station on the continent, with about 1,100 people living there in the summer, about 250 in the winter.

Rittenhouse spent two years in Alaska at two different bases in 1985-86 and 1986-87, serving as the only electrician at the South Pole for 17 people who stayed over his second winter on Antarctica.

He said some of the crew, which included scientists, a doctor and a mechanic, went through personality changes after spending so much time indoors to get away from the extreme weather.

“Every two or three months the doc pulled us in for psyche tests to see how we were doing,” he said. “I never got the results back. They sent them back to my company by satellite.”

Arkansas City Commissioner Mell Kuhn was a plumber-fitter at McMurdo in 1986-87, after Rittenhouse had been transferred to another base.

“It was a great adventure and a great experience, but I had to go home to my wife and kids,” Kuhn said.