i bet you all thought i would be writing you from the dear ol' chilly land of white.... and so did i. *grin* but rather, another tale has been added to my adventure. but how i love these evolving events!
so as planned, all of us here awoke at 0dark30 (actually 4:30am which isn't all that bad) and brought ourselves out to the international antarctic center where the excitement begins. we began to layer on our 35 lbs of ecw (extremely cold weather) gear. (people here LOVE acronyms!). getting onto the cargo plane is required to have enough clothes on their person so that they are prepared if we were to crash or have an emergency landing.
we then checked ourselves into us air force security...and i literally mean ourselves. we first loaded our check luggage onto a scale and once they authorized it, then we-our person with all of our gear and our carry on orange luggage bag had to step on the scale. I carried 64lb more than my body weight, which is over half my body weight!!
just imagine pulling up to a huge grey u.s. air force plane (like the ones in the news flying to iraq), wearing moon boots, big red parkas, and carrying over half your body weight. the doors were lowered and one by one we got on. a pallet of seats were spread into the center of the cargo space and strapped down. seats lined the walls on both sides and large pallets of cargo were strapped into the back of the plane. above us was the metal body of the plane covered in thousands and thousands of wires. all the explosive equipment was labeled. each of us were handed one set of earplugs to help block the loud roar of the engine.
i was going to antarctica.
or so i thought.
about three hours into our 6 hour flight, the captain got on the loudspeaker. this was the first word we heard from our military flight attendant. "we are currently two hours from mcmurdo station. the winds there have been blowing strong all morning. we had hopes that they would clear, but we haven't found a pocket. so, we are turning the plane around. our estimated time of arrive in christchurch is 3 hours and 20 minutes. that is 3:30." the plane roar continued, then took a drastic shift.
we got BOOMERANGed!
so, here i am now, sitting in christchurch with another $200 dollars in my pocket (minus the turkish kabobs, and fantabulous dessert from a restaurant called 'strawberry fair'). we hear the runways out on the ice are pretty bad, so we are watching for continued plane delays....and more money in our pockets. nothing like working in extreme climates-not that i have done it yet! *grin* but i am being paid as though i am!
i'll keep all of you posted. and you can think of me tomorrow because i may be pulling into all that ecw gear again!
with love,
tia
No comments:
Post a Comment