Hurry up and wait

I woke up at 4:30AM to get ready but 10 minutes later the hotel called to let me know that the flight was delayed for 3 hours. At 7:40 they called again to say the day's flight had been cancelled. This is not unusual early in the season, but it would have been nice to reach the next point in the trip. On the positive side, being in Christchurch means I've got my own private hotel room with WiFi. In McMurdo I'll be sharing a room with at least 5 other people and Internet connections are only available via Ethernet -- there are too many experiments which would be disrupted by wireless signals.

A couple of my co-workers were supposed to be at the Pole a week ago, but their flights have been cancelled every day so they've been trapped in McMurdo. These guys have hardware-related tasks at Pole so losing a week puts them behind schedule. I'm going there mainly to provide support for the new winter-overs and to do a few tasks that would be difficult or cause us to lose data if I lost the satellite connection while things were only partially completed.

I'll probably stay close to my room today, trying to get some work done. While I was in transit some scientists tried to do some unusual operations with the detector which caused problems with my software so I'm hoping to dig into the log files and figure out what went wrong.

The picture above is a statue honoring Robert Scott, the British explorer who lost the race to the South Pole and died on the return trip. It was carved by his widow in the early 1900s. During the 2011 earthquake it was knocked off its pedestal and broke in half. They're still working on restoring it but it looks like they're getting close to finishing!