Today is the day! – for the first half of our team, anyway.  Four of us are scheduled for the 1300 flight this afternoon to Beardmore (or CTAM, if you are keeping track previous blogs), from which we’ll then be flown to our camp.  So the last night for a while sleeping on a mattress.

 

When checking out, the procedure is to clean our room and strip our bed for the next occupant.  But we leave the linens outside the door to our room, just in case we end up back in McMurdo (if weather doesn’t let us land, for example.)

So here’s a photo of my room in McMurdo.  My stripped bed is on the right, with my ECW (Extreme Cold Weather) gear on it, ready to fly, and my roommate’s bed is on the left.  My roommate is an undergraduate from the University of Alaska Fairbanks down here working on the West Antarctica Ice Sheet drilling project.  One of the awesome things about Antarctica is meeting wonderful new people who are doing cool things!  When I ship out, she’ll get another roommate.

Okay, now to breakfast and final preparations before catching for the shuttle to the plane. . .

-posted by Devon, Dec 11 from McMurdo