Molokai Life: Life back on the Ice

I’ve been waiting to write until I had some news about a full season contract. I have a job! Hurray! I’ll be working in the store which should be a lot of fun. Our little general store is full of souvenir gifts, food/snacky items, toiletries, movies for rent, alcohol, etc… It's a pretty social place with great people and despite not being outside, except for moving inventory about town, I’m looking forward to it. Not much time to spare before this offer came through and honestly my standards started getting lower. I adjusted after the first week & decided I really did want to stay for another full season.

Working in the BFC was awesome. Most of the time we pulled gear for the science groups, as Ben already explained. The other part of that was "tetrisizing" it all into the smallest space possible, and going vertical. There was a lot of climbing shelves stuffing sleeping bags into the little spaces between tents and 5 gallon buckets used for human waste. I definitely got my workout over the last few weeks. Here's a shot of the BFC springfly army.

In my short time here I've trained at the store, before I knew I had a job there I signed up to work part time, trained people on driving the airporters, and had a Delta refresher course. I've volunteered to pick up the first 3 flights of mainbody, which were scheduled to start on Tuesday and have yet to make it here. There are about 300+ people stuck, if you can call it "stuck" in Christchurch, and everyday the flights are delayed and then cancelled. We did have one make it within an hour of the runway only to boomerang back to NZ. There are mixed feelings here, those folks who are ready to leave after a year here are frustrated, as are those who are waiting for friends, spouses, significant others. Then, there are those who are psyched to have the station population kept small at 300 people for another week. As with most things, they'll get here when they get here.

Here is a nice photo I took out the window on my flight down this year. We had beautiful weather and it actually was really warm when we landed. It was great to walk off the plane and be greeted by friends.

I spent hours watching the sunsets, they literally last 5 hours here. Here are a couple of photos from Hut Point.