What do stamp dealers do on New Years Eve?

Tony Shields from Shields Stamps shared his passion for the Antarctic and philately in the recent PTS Handbook, you can read it here.    He will also be heading to the Antarctic convention in Hobart later in the year where he will be one of the only philatelic retailers and you can hear more about this from his on our new PTS Trade Vlog which is set to launch this week.  Sign up to the newsletter here.

In the mean time, here Tony shares what he did on New Years Eve... 

'On New Years Eve, I was an invited speaker on the Qantas dreamliner Antarctic flight from Melbourne. We flew with 235 passengers non-stop from Tullamarine airport down to the Antarctic continent and then returned in a trip taking 15 hours. This is one of the longest flights in the world and certainly the most spectacular. We spent about 5 hours over the great white continent and had several speakers on board including me, covering a lot of the early history of explorers down there. I get the run of the plane and sell raffle tickets raising money for the conservation of Mawson's Huts, which are one of the six oldest buildings in Antarctica. They were built of Baltic pine in 1911 and lived in for 3 years. As it happened they were built on the windiest place on Earth where the katabatic winds reach 300 km per hour. I also conduct an auction for the same cause and meet and greet most of the passengers and crew. We had 40 hours of unbroken daylight and I worked for close to 30 hours. Counting down the New Year in broad daylight at 15000 ft flying over the ice with a glass of champagne in hand is very hard to beat!'
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