Unpacking and back to New Zealand

A side note before I get started - I am writing this post from Colorado! I am very excited to be home with Tom and Emma. This will be my last blog post for this Antarctic season. I enjoyed sharing my adventures with you. I hope you enjoyed them too.

My least favorite part of every camping trip is unpacking. 

Suz, John, and I met up on the morning of Monday January 27th to get all of our gear unpacked and returned to its various departments. First we had to get the sleds forked from the Transition. We rented a truck, drove down to the Transition, and drove the snowmobiles and sleds over to the Transition. Ed, the fork truck driver, was incredibly skilled at picking the sleds up off the ice and placing them on a pallet for transportation back to McMurdo. Thanks to his skills, this process when much quicker than we had expected.

We spent most of the day, unpacking the sleds and returning our gear. I didn’t take any pictures of this – honestly, I think I was just too tired – but something tells me that you probably get the idea.

Fortunately, our gear return went much quicker than we had expected. Most of our camping gear was returned by Monday night. Tuesday morning, I returned our comms equipment. After that we just had a few loose ends to take care of. Thinking that we didn’t need until the following Monday (our original scheduled flight to Christchurch) to finish up these things and knowing that the planners were looking for people to fly north (there were too many people scheduled to fly the following week), we asked if we could get moved to an earlier flight. Lucky for us, there was room on Thursday’s flight to Christchurch. We tried not to get too excited, because things in McMurdo can change quickly. We could have easily gotten bumped off the flight or had either bad weather or mechanical issues delay the flight, but we were fortunate. By 9:45 am on the morning of Thursday January 30th we were being transported out to Pegasus airfield for a C130 flight north to Christchurch, New Zealand.

The Cress vehicle

On our way to the airfield, the Cress vehicle stopped and the door opened. The driver told us there was a group of emperor penguins on the other side of a mill van. I walked over with my camera and found fourteen emperors. Penguins are my all time favorite animal, so I was pretty excited. This was definitely a good way to leave Antarctica.

Emperor penguins on our way to Pegasus airfield

Our flight north was good. We left almost an hour late, around 1:30 pm instead of 12:30 pm, but we arrived in Christchurch around 8:40 pm, which was only 10 minutes late. Not too bad. We went through customs, returned our cold weather gear (parkas, books, etc.), grabbed a shuttle,  and got some dinner. I made it to my hotel, exhausted, at 11:30 pm.

It was a short night for me. The airport shuttle picked me up at 4:00 am the next morning. Fortunately, I didn’t care because I was on my way home to see Emma and Tom!

Overall this was a great, successful season!