Travels

Wednesday January 3rd - Air Travels

We began our exciting journey to the ice on Wednesday Jan 3rd at Dane County regional airport.  It was difficult to get packed the night before and even more difficult to give hugs, kisses, and say goodbye.  I arrived at the airport 2 hours before my first short hop from MSN to ORD scheduled at 10:36 am.  TSA-Pre was great!  We went right on through to our gate and waited for boarding.  Weather and visibility were great so we should get right out, so we thought.

At boarding time it was clear that we were already going to be delayed because there was no plane outside the gate.  Our plane was coming from Chicago O'Hare (ORD) with passengers and then returning with us.  The gate agent announced that the plane had not left Chicago yet and was being de-iced.  Ahhh, the joys of winter flights through ORD.  Matthew and I started doing some basic time analysis of our flights.  Our connecting flight from ORD to SFO begins boarding at 12:37pm and closes the doors at 12:57pm.  We decided to give a call to the Antarctic program travel department.  They were awesome, they started trying to see about other options right away but had us stay the course and stretch for our upcoming run.  We got word the flight was in the air.  We were able to get boarded and out pretty quickly.  We arrived and deplaned and then began our ORD 1K as I called it.  We ran from Terminal 1 last gate to Terminal 2 middle.  We arrived just in time for boarding to start.  No lunch but we can buy snacks on the plane.

Our second flight from ORD to SFO got out on time and was jetting across the US no problem.  We were going to arrive early at SFO and have plenty of time for dinner.  The conditions were quite windy during landing.  I was chatting with the lady next to me and noticed we were nearing the ground and then accelerating upwards and out towards the ocean.  Odd!  A few minutes later the captain came on the overhead and announced that we aborted landing due to too high of tailwinds.  We were turning around and re-entering the landing pattern.  The second attempt was bumpy but successful.

We had time for dinner and Facetime back home, then headed to our gate for the next LONG flight.  12+ hour flight.  SFO to Auckland flight crossing the date line was long but I was able to get 3 to 4 hours of sleep, with some interruptions.  We arrived in New Zealand on Friday January 5th local time, got through passport control and customs with no problems, rechecked our luggage and headed to the gate for our last flight for a few days.

The last flight took us from Auckland NZ to Christchurch NZ.  After 32+ hours of traveling Matthew and I are at our hotel.  The next few days include some downtime, a meeting or two, a visit to the clothing distribution center and then on January 9th we will board the LC-130 for our ice flight.

More to come.....