Barb’s and Juliane’s snow drifted tent. Our solar panel is on the left.

Barb greeting the new year at midnight Dec. 31st with a happy jump!

We were greeted on this first day of 2018 with sunshine and low winds. Perfect! But with a big temperature drop. It was cold today. Despite all our layers. Since today is a holiday we started work at 10am instead of 9am. Yay! Of course we had to dig ourselves out of our tents again first before we could start. We covered a lot of ground today on a big ice field and found 7 meteorites. Not as many as we had hoped for but the ones we found were big. So we are partially satisfied. Our total meteorite number has thus increased to 138. The wind picked up again quite a bit during the day and at 4:30pm, with everyone freezing, we called it a day. Back in camp we stared to dig up all our equipment such as flags that had drifted over with snow during the day. Then we had to chip ice and snow for melting water and had to dig out our tent again before we could warm up, but by now that’s old news. We are quite exhausted from today and I for one, am starving. Dinner is cooking on the stove: pasta that sucks up all water so we don’t need to drain it -which would be a waste of our water that we worked so hard for- with dehydrated corn, frozen peas, and frozen tuna, all mixed together and heated up until done. Like a pasta stew. Yum. Tomorrow we are scheduled for our resupply mission and we really hope it will happen. Because we are officially out of skidoo fuel. We were able to fuel almost all skidoos one last time today after we came back to camp but during the fueling of Jim’s skidoo we ran out. So fingers crossed for tomorrow. We are hopeful, but even if fate is against us tomorrow, we are resourceful people and already have several master plans how to deal with the situation. One involves a sledge!!