in front of the fire with Apple.

My long trek from the field finally ended when I made it home late on the eve of the 30th. Since then I’ve been trying to adjust to the time change and the busy life of my household, swarming with kids and pets and visitors.  Antarctic cold here in Cleveland, so no big climate adaptation, but I miss my beard (removed in McMurdo so my wife and daughter would take me back).  And luckily there’s abundant sunshine (not the most common thing in Cleveland in early January) that should help me adapt to a day-night cycle, something that’s been mostly missing for me for a month.

I thought I’d quickly mention an aspect of Antarctic travel that’s pretty special to me given I’ve been doing this for over 25 years- meeting old friends.  There’s the folks I see every deployment,  of course, folks who have worked in McMurdo or Christchurch for a long time that I interact with almost yearly.  More exciting is seeing people that I’ve missed for many years or people I’ve known through third parties and never met before, and both of these things happened on my travels home.  First it was Ralph (Andy) Young, a talented mechanic and mountaineer/guide who I first met in McMurdo more than a decade ago.  We bonded over snowmobiles and our mutual old-school first name, but like a lot of contract workers he got bored with life in McMurdo after a few seasons and left for stints at Palmer, as a hand at large field camps,  etc.   I hadn’t seen him in a very long time, but we ended up on the same flight from McMurdo to Christchurch, so it was a very very pleasant time catching up while travelling that leg.

A different kind of surprise on the flight from Sydney to Dallas.  That flight was very full, unfortunately, and I was in the very back of the aircraft.  shortly after reaching cruising altitude I stood up and stretched a bunch when a distinguished red-haired gentleman approached me and said with a smile, “Would you be Dr. Ralph Harvey?”   I said I was, and he said “Does the name Andy Thomas mean anything to you?”   I wracked my brain and disassembled, because it didn’t immediately-  and then he told me he was Shannon’s husband, and it all clicked.  I had known that her husband had been in Australia during our deployment and I had a vague memory of his face from seeing his picture when he was an astronaut. we spent the next half hour gossiping about the astronaut corp, NASA, the meteorite work,  all the common ground.  It was an awesome way to start a long flight for me-  instead of feeling like an anonymous little critter in a cage,  it was suddenly a plane full of people with stories and places to go and friends to make.

So it was a decent trip home-  too long of course, but no delays at any stage and the long layovers between flights was a blessing in some ways (no fears of missing connections, time to eat and move around and reorganize and send some messages home and elsewhere).  Now I’ve got a 75 lb. puppy in my lap,  a fire in the woodstove and a fuzzy brain, and I’m home.

-posted by rph from Novelty, Ohio