Antarctic Episode III ~ Weather Delays

Well, we're still stuck in Christchurch. The weather has been spotty in McMurdo and we haven't been able to leave for several reasons. The first is, due to budget cuts and reallocations within the NSF, the Air Force is responsible for keeping the airstrip on the ice clean instead of the ASC contractors and I'm told by one of the airman who is also stuck here that the Air Force is running a skeleton crew down there due to their own budget issues. He said that every time they get an appreciable amount of snow on the airstrip it takes them a day to clean it out. The second reason is also due to cuts: flights are no longer happening whenever the weather allows and instead are whenever the weather allows *during normal working hours*. Apparently, they don't want to pay a night/Sunday crew...

So my daily schedule here in Christchurch has been as follows:

• 0400 local time: wake up and pack all my stuff at the hotel and ready for my shuttle pickup at 0515; call flight info to confirm flight check in time is still 0600 for a departure time of 0900

• 0500 receive call at hotel room that the flight has been delayed three hours and new shuttle pickup time is 0815 for a new check in time at 0900 and a departure time of 1200; go back to "sleep"

•  0800 check out of hotel; two minutes after checking out of hotel, the hotel receives a call that the flight has been delayed until the next day; check back into the hotel; go have breakfast and coffee while figuring out what to do with the day.

• Lather, rinse, repeat. There have been several windows overnight where we could have flown. At least they don't make us wait around in our ECW until noon like they did on Monday...

Flight delays aside, exploring Christchurch has been really cool! On Tuesday we went to the Canterbury museum where there are expansive displays about Maori culture and history. There's also a whole Antarctic history display with tons of cool stuff. There's displays about the explorers and early expeditions with some of their equipment that worked (and didn't work), some more modern equipment, even a display with two skins of the Greenland huskies that were used until the 80's. In fact, one of the huskies was bought by our friends Brian and Kay, brought to Alaska, lived for another 10 years, and when she died, Brian had the skin preserved and send it down to this museum where it's on display! It's neat that a dog as traveled so far too.

Yesterday, we went to the Canterbury A&P show (an agriculture event just like our fairs) that's part of the Cup and Show week where there's agriculture, horse races, and fashion shows celebrating New Zealand's agricultural history and culture. There were livestock judging, horse riding, wood chopping competitions, dog sheepherding competitions, carnival rides, street food and wine and beer, and (the coolest part) new and old farming equipment. There were tons of restored tractors and cars and such, mostly the red Ferguson and Internationals.

There was one beautifully restored 1937 John Deere model A that I was looking at for awhile. Then this older guy came up and asked if I had any questions, so I asked about the top hood (it didn't have any signs of rust or repairs from being cut to do a different repair back in the day) and the magneto (it wasn't the Wico-branded one that we have on ours). He said he had a machine shop build him a new hood based on the old spec since the original was basically rusted and gone and that they sold different magnetos to the New Zealand market at that time. 

He asked how a young guy like me knew these things, so I showed him the pictures and video of the '42 we have and that launched a whole conversation about the similarities and differences between that one and the unstyled A that he has. He even said he just received parts in the mail from Iowa for another project he's restoring! He had to run off to the vintage equipment judging event, so I got a video of him starting it and taking off and then I went to pet the sheep.

So far today, I've been to the grocery store and bought a dozen kiwifruit, three oranges, three pears, three apples, an avocado, a 200g block of local goat cheese, a 250g bag of cashews, and a 250g block of chocolate for $30 NZ. I think I'm going to take some of this bounty to the botanical gardens and have me a picnic. 

It's not a real vacation though since have been able to do some work from here though. That's the good and bad thing about working with networked equipment: because we theoretically can do work from anywhere, we need to be available to diagnose when equipment misbehaves. I wish I could make it farther out of town and into the neighboring small towns but the less-than 24 hour away check in time and the expectation that we need to stay in contact limits how far we can adventure.

Here's hoping for good weather tomorrow! Love you,
Drew

...