It's Thanksgiving Day on the U.S. Antarctic bases, and of course that means people running a 5K Turkey Trot, even in Antarctica. Everyone normally works a 6-day week, then has Sunday off. For holidays we also get Saturday off and the galley prepares a special evening meal. This means there's no hot lunch service, but that just means being able to eat more food at dinner :-)
Since everyone has Saturday and Sunday off, that means no flights in or out of McMurdo. The IceCube winter-overs were supposed to leave the continent 20 days ago, but the weather here has been bad so they're still stranded. After a year of planning what they'll do after they leave the ice, it's got to be EXTREMELY frustrating to be here 3 weeks later.
I'm doing my own sort of "travel math". I was scheduled to be at Pole for 17 days. We were delayed in Christchurch for a full week and I've been in McMurdo for a week. I'm scheduled to start my journey back from Pole on Thursday, 5 days from now.
If we fly on Monday I'll still be able to do a few useful administrative things which are dangerous to perform over a satellite link. Those links can die unexpectedly, and my changes might leave the detector in an unusable state until the satellite link came back so I've been saving a few tasks until I had a direct connection to the machines there.
If we fly on Tuesday or Wednesday, my main purpose will be package delivery. My checked bag contains an instrument that a co-worker needs at Pole, and that bag has been sitting at the bottom of a shrink-wrapped pallet somewhere a the cargo warehouse.
If we don't fly on Tuesday, I'll have to go up to Cargo and warn them that if the Wednesday flight is canceled, I'll need my bag pulled so I can hand the package to someone else. If that happens, I'll just hang around McMurdo until Friday, when I'm scheduled to fly back to "Cheech" (the common nickname for Christchurch). Of course, given the weather this season I'm also mentally preparing myself to spend next weekend stuck here in "paradise" :-(
1 comment:
Yikes! I hope the weather clears and you get to Pole!
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