Christchurch!

24 Oct 2016

Ah, it feels good to be back!  I didn't send much time in Christchurch when I was last in NZ, but just being back in the country at all feels very nostalgic for me.  This is great.  I'm constantly fighting the urge to run over to the airport, hire a car and hit the road to visit the places I did spend a lot of time.

Tomorrow at 9am I'll head to the local headquarters of the US Antarctic Program (USAP) and be issued my Extreme Cold Weather gear (ECW).  After that, we begin the weather waiting game.  I'm staying at a hotel that is frequently used by USAP.  When the clerk checked me in, he said, "I have you for two nights right now, ready to stretch it to 10..."  Everything depends on the highly variable weather at McMurdo.  Ideally, I'll get there on Wednesday or Thursday, but delays of a week or more are not unprecedented.  Once I get to McMurdo, the flight to pole itself is equally uncertain.

We have no cell service at pole, so I got rid of my cell phone, but I've moved my number to google voice.  I believe this means that once I get to pole, I'll be able to receive phone calls using the same number I've had for 16 years.  We have phones in our room, and I think I'll be able to set that as a forwarding number for my google voice account (our phone numbers all have Denver area codes, because computers).  Txt messages will definitely go to my email.

I hope you all had a good 23 Oct, I didn't get one.  I left Dallas on the 22nd, and the next thing I knew it was the 24th in Sydney.