It’s picture time. While I’ve been here for a day and a half, and a ton of stuff has been thrown at me, I want to step back a minute and chronicle my trip here in pictures. It started in Denver, where I spent two days at orientation:

Raytheon Polar Headquarters

The folks there were friendly, helpful and everyone, both new and returning, where excited to be there. Here was our greeting:

After orientation, we had our marathon flight to Christchurch. Once there, one of my favorite things I can across was this Indian restaurant, which clearly used to be a gas station in it’s previous life. I ended up eating here for dinner, and it was quite good (though I am no expert on Indian food)

Indian Restaurant in Christchurch

The next day we got our Extreme Cold Weather (ECW) gear at the CDC (Clothing Distribution Center). There we tried on all our clothing to make sure it fit and was in good shape. If it wasn’t we were able to exchange it. I asked for size L jackets, shirts and parkas, but they all turned out to be a bit small so I went to XL. Much better. The CDC, once emptied, looked like this (the orange bags were where all our ECW was stuffed):

Decked in my sexy parka and overalls, I looked something like this:

The parka (as with all the gear) really is extreme cold weather. I love it. It promises to keep me warm even in pretty bad conditions. The downside is that it is ridiculously bulky, so once it warms up a bit I may stow it away for smaller things. Speaking of weather, next up is a graph! It shows how my local high temperature has changed over the past few days as my journey has progressed.

Once we were geared up and ready to head down, they loaded us into a C-17 which had been modified to carry about 100 people. The interior looked like this:

We were delayed for about on hour while weather passed through McMurdo, but we were soon on our way. The flight was loud, but we had earplugs which muffled the sound well. 5 hours later, we landed at the bottom of the world. Unfortunately, I can’t post the video here, but you can find it on my facebook page. Let me know if you have trouble viewing it and I will try to upload it to youtube.