My, my, the last few days have been long and tiring. Since the season is slowly coming to its end, we had to pack and wrap a lot of stuff up. Of course, the packed and wrapped boxes also needed to be carried from one place to another! So, it has been quite a bit of work and I am soooooo tired, you won’t believe it! Furthermore, temperatures are slowly crawling down, today we hit the -50C mark with windchill! I have only two more days left, but I might see the ambient temperature go down to -40C, which will make the nightly trip to the bathroom, well, difficult.

Otherwise, I took it easy this evening. The non-science people here have Sundays off which makes Sats a party day. So, I was watching “Sin City” in one of the TV rooms and slowing a bit down…

Even though the station will be open for almost two more weeks, all the heavy equipment is already stowed away. When it gets too cold, most dozers and trucks will not run, so the construction work has to end around first week of Feb. Icecube deployed its last string one week ago, now the whole drill camp is ready to be towed to the winter over position, where it will await the next season.

The station population is still rather high, 247 women and men are currently living here. When the station closes around Feb 17th, only about 50 will remain as winter overs! This means, that starting next week, flights outbound will carry a lot of people back to Christchurch.

My flight back is scheduled for the 6th. It will be straight through, so in McMurdo I will be changing planes only, no stay over for one night. This is partially a pity, since there is one or two things I would have liked to do there, but on the other hand, I am ready to go home! Or have my vacation…