Nov 1st – Day 27 of “The Commute”

Made it to McMurdo about 6 days ago! sorry for the delay in posting.

My laptop charger decided to stop working on the first day of my arrival, so I’ve not been able to use that. The internet in McMurdo is also pretty slow (though it is available 24 hours/ day there are also ~600 people using it).

The weather has been really nice; temps around 10F with windchills around 0F. Lots of sunshine. I’ve been doing lots of outdoor activities while trying to not get sunburnt. One of the “challenges” here in mcm is the Observation Hill “Everest challenge” — which is ascending the Obs Hill about 40 times in order to climb the height of Everest. Obs hill is about 750 ft tall, and Everest is ~29k ft . It takes me somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes per up-and-back, so I’ve managed to do ~30 so far and will probably finish today or tomorrow depending on how many I want to do (i.e. how long I want to be outside).

You can keep up with my activities on Strava (at least while I’m in McM… not sure I can upload to it from Pole, and probably won’t have reliable GPS).

I’ve still got probably at least a week until I fly further south, so I have some plans to run a marathon length run using all the available trails around McM (there’s a good 13 mile loop I can run twice… lots of elevation gain, so it should be pretty tough).

I got to play volleyball on Sunday for the first time in almost 9 months (since I was here last!) . I was definitely rusty, but started picking it back up… getting ready for Pole!!

That’s about it. Living meal-to-meal like usual. Will update once I know my flight schedule.