Christchurch, CHC, Cheech!

The Christchurch leg of the trip has been very enjoyable both times. The Kiwis have always been very friendly and the weather pleasant. It's a nice place to catch your breath and get ready for the next legs of the trip.

The primary focus is to pick up your ECW (Extreme Cold Weather) gear. This happens at the CDC (clothing distribution center) which is in the Antarctic Center right by the airport. The gear you get depends on where on the continent you'll be going and what you're planning to do. I'm a computer geek, so they expect me to spend most of my time inside typing; I don't get Carharts or other heavy duty work gear. You still get pleny of thermal underwear, wool socks, and "Big Red" which is the Canada Goose jacket you haul all over the place. If you've seen any antarctic documentaries, odds are you've seen this coat.

The day before your flight, you head to the CDC and try out all your gear to make sure it fits. They've got it packaged up into two bags that have everything you'll need. You just need to try it on to make sure the sizes are right and that it's all there (they give you a check list). Really pretty easy, so I'm in and out.

The USAP travel folks are right around the corner, so those of us who had some bags wandering around the world stopped over to check on their status. The travel folks are great. You give them your name, they tap a few keys and give you what is currently known about the status of your bag. Since nothing was really known about my bag at this point, they started hounding the airlines and sent me on my way. It's nice having someone who knows the system on a professional basis do the hunting. They do this for a couple thousand people a year, so by now, they are probably on a first name basis with every airline worker on the island.

So by about 10:00am, I was free and clear for the rest of the day. I ran into a couple of airport buddies at the CDC who were also hunting their bags. One of the nice things about the travel is that you are issued two very distinctive luggage tags. It makes it very easy to find others who are headed in the same direction. That's how I met Thomas and Sean. They work on a project called SuperTIGER which is a (very) distant cousin to IceCube. They are studying cosmic ray composition using long duration balloon flights. Basically, take your detector, tie it to a balloon, elevate to about 128,000 feet and let it circle around the continent for a month or so. That is about as cool as it gets!

They had rented a car, so we took off for some touristing. This is always good, because I am a terrible tourist. Cities don't usually interest me much, so going some place to work is fun, but when the work is done I usually dont feel compelled to seek out local attractions. So I usually end up tagging along with people who *do* like being tourists. So our first stop was the Royal New Zealand Airforce museum. They are busy working on restoring every plane that ever flew for the RNZAF. If you are ever in Christchurch and tour the museum, pay the $10 to take the tour. Our tour guide was a retired pilot who actually works on their restoration efforts when he's not giving the tours. They have a lot of cool stuff.

After the museum, we headed to Cathedral square. This was at my request. My last trip was in 2009 which was the year before the big earthquakes that hit New Zealand. I knew things had been badly damaged, so I wanted to see how things looked. It was pretty bad. Large sections of the area are too dangerous for pedestrians and are fenced off. The cathedral in Cathedral Square was almost completely destroyed. Even a couple years on, there are buildings that have not been demolished. They are working hard on saving the buildings that can be saved but it is a monumental task.

In the meantime, they have turned modified cargo containers into a sort of open air walking mall. When I first heard this, I was a bit skeptical, but it is really quite nice. Still, it is quite different from the first trip and it has devastated or outright destroyed a lot of the businesses in the area.

After that, we headed out to Lyttleton which is basically a suburb of Christchurch. That's where the harbor is. After a bit of dinner, we drove up to the summit of some of the small mountains that surround the city. It was an awesome view.

All in all, a good day and a nice chance to catch a breath before the flight the next day.