Blogs from Antarctica - page 64

Morning... Musee Cluny, Pantheon and McDonalds! We finally slept in past 7am! We headed down to breakfast around 8:30am, the latest morning so far! The headed off to the Musee d' Cluny, home of the Unicorn Tapestries! There is also supposed to be a garden set in a medival style based on the tapestries, but I don't know that we found it. There was a garden out front, but who knows... The building was cool, very medival. We headed down the street to the Pantheon. The inside was really cool, the largest pendulum in the world hangs from the top of the dome. We debated on walking up the 206 stairs to the top of the dome, and finally caved in and did it. Yes, it was worth it, got some great shots. But we whined ... read more

I havent uploaded anything to this blog for the past 5 days or so because I have been spending my evenings working on my Halloween costume. The great thing about Halloween in Antarctica is that people get really creative with the resources on station. We have been dumpster diving for steel cargo banding, paint, glue, old colored sheets and other items that were destined for recycling or a landfill back home. Sandwich (otherwise known as Allison) came up with the great idea to do a group costume themed around the saying 'it's a harsh continent', although we changed it to "it's a harsh condiment". We have "Best Moves" mayo, A1 steak sauce, French's mustard gas, Heiny tomato ketchup, kikkoman soy sauce, and I am going as Tabasco Pepper Spray. We have been working all week during ... read more

Less than 2 weeks to go. 10 days to be precise. Starting to get really excited. Am beginning to realise that there is rather a lot of things that need to be done before then. I think (or hope) that we have bought everything that we need. We have had the injections. I had to have 3 but Tim only had to have 2! This seems grossly unfair. It was something to do with one of his being a triple vaccine. Anyway we are now covered for polio, tetanus, diphtheria, typhoid and hepatitis A. We also got the malaria tablets. Wow, those things are expensive. We are still recovering from the shock of it costing £85.85 each! I think most of the things we need to book in advance are sorted out. We have bought our ... read more

The cameras that we made for the penguin research group have been on the roof of the Crary Lab for the past week. Today we brought them in, inspected them and then as the weather turned sour, I decided to put one out to see how it would get along with the wind. Its condition 2 right now with gusts up to 50 mph, snow blowing all over the place and temps are down to about -19C. Its pretty awesome. I posted a stitched panorama that was taken by one of the cameras on the roof a few days ago.... read more

It was a beautiful day - The sun was shining brightly over the western slopes of Mt Erebus, there was no wind to speak of and the temperature was warm by Antarctic standards. We were cruising at between five and ten miles per hour towards the North. We had been underway for over an hour and we still had another half hour to go before we reached our destination. Our route took us to the west of the Erebus Glacier Ice Tongue, which is a large, narrow glacier flowing down from the frozen slopes of Mt. Erebus that extends off of the coast of Ross Island into Erebus Bay, and past several small islands - Tent Island and Inaccessible Island were to the left of our route and Big & Little Razorback where to the right. ... read more