Uncle Rickie on Ice

Well I don’t have a ton of stuff to post, so I thought I’d go back and show you some old stuff from the first few times I was down here. Some people have seen this stuff, but I don’t think any of you have. Eventually after you’ve seen and done everything then there isn’t much point in continuing to take pictures of the same things and posting about them over and over. Since this is all new to you all, then I’ll just show you everything I can find in the coming weeks and months. I’ve been trying to remember to take pictures since being back this time, so I thought I should show you the most recent stuff first, then show you some old stuff. Maybe I’ll go back and forth with old stuff and new stuff as it comes along, that seems like a good way to do it.

I forgot to take any photos of anything before I got on the plane, but you’ve probably all seen an airport. The wallpaper in the bathroom in the plane on the big flight from California to New Zealand was kind of funny, so I thought you might like it. Haha

This is our plane we took in New Zealand from Auckland to Christchurch. Getting filled up with the go-go juice.

In the shuttle waiting for a couple more people so we can get to the hotel so I can take a shower and take a nap! I was tired.

Yes! The hotel. It looks like any hotel back home basically, right?

The outlets are totally different though. They all look sad and they each have their own switch to turn them off individually, which is kind of cool.

This was the view out my window, it was nice and cool out, so I sat with the window open and just listened to the world.

We were there for a couple days so I got to walk around the city a bit. I didn’t really take a lot of pics, but I did the first couple times I was there, so I’ll post some of those pictures in a later post. I stopped at this place called “Burger Fuel” so get something to eat.

It’s a car themed burger place and I got the “American Muscle” burger, it’s really good. They also have this cool chandelier hanging up that has a bunch of spark plugs in it.

The burger comes in this cool package. You just pull on the strip and it splits the package in two pieces.

Then you get like a little tray to eat the burger out of so you don’t get messy. The burger doesn’t come with a bite taken out, I was hungry and didn’t think to take the picture until I had already gobbled on it. Haha

I also got Taco Bell, which has only been in New Zealand for a few years now. It’s really good. It does taste a little different than the Taco Bell from back home, but I think that’s because they use better ingredients in New Zealand. It’s good though. Their sauce packets are different too, sort of have a paper-like feel to it, but it’s obviously not paper, it wasn’t leaking. Haha

We went and tried on all our ECW(Extreme Cold Weather) gear at the CDC(Clothing Distribution Center). Again, I didn’t take enough pics there, but I did in the past so I’ll show more pics of it in a later post. After we were finished trying all the ECW on and making sure we have everything we need, then we were all waiting for our shuttle back to the hotel outside the USAP Passenger Terminal. Tomorrow we’ll put on all our ECW and then go into the passenger terminal to get a briefing and then go get on the plane.

The next day we got back to the passenger terminal. This is right inside the door of the passenger terminal. Those are the flags of the nations who have signed the Antarctic Treaty. To the right of that person is where you take your bags and go through an X-ray machine and metal detection like you would at any other airport.

Then we have to sit and watch a few videos and wait for our time to go.

Once it’s time to go we go through the metal detector, and wait outside the back of the building for the bus. The CDC is right across the street from the airport. As you can see below it’s a very short bus ride across the street to the airplane.

They drive us up to the plane. They give us a sack lunch and a bottle of water and onto the plane we go.

This is the view from my seat for the next 5 hours.

Operation Deep Freeze is what the military calls what we’re doing down here. The C-17s we fly on, the one in these photos, are flown by active duty US Airforce folks who work out of McChord airbase in Washington state.

We also sometimes fly on the LC-130 which is flown by the New York Air National Guard. The “L” in LC-130 means that is has the skis on the landing gear as you can see below. It’s also called “The Hercules” or just Herc. I don’t like flying on the Herc because it’s slower, so it’s an 8 hour flight instead of 5 hours on the C-17, it’s also a lot louder inside for some reason, and it’s smaller so it’s more cramped.

Here is my room for the summer season. As you can see I have a roommate, my bed is the one that is made. Haha

You can see that we each have a wardrobe the hang our clothes, a small fridge, and a sink in our room, and then our room shares a bathroom with the room nextdoor. You can’t see the bathroom, it’s behind the wall the sink is on.

It’s not fun with no privacy, so we found some more bed pieces and some bamboo and made ourselves a privacy wall.

Here is the finished product.

Here is a cool picture I took on the way to work a few weeks ago. My commute to work is about 150 yards, on some days it isn’t even blowing snow in your face. 🙂

Sometimes the nasty weather can make things look pretty, or at least neat. 🙂

My new job is in what we call AFRTS (we pronounce that A-farts, yep:) ). It stands for American Force Radio Television Service. So my job is to setup all the movies that play on TV as well as manage the radio station and our vinyl room. I’m only doing this job to fill in for someone for about 6 weeks, then I’ll go back over to the PC shop where I can be a computer nerd again. 🙂

Here I am checking on some of the equipment and making sure the movies are playing like they’re supposed to.

Me being a DJ and playing some music for everyone to listen to. Ice Radio 104.5FM! 🙂

I also have to maintain the vinyl collection. I can already hear someone out there screaming, “BUT YOU’RE ONLY SUPPOSED TO TOUCH THE ALBUM BY THE EDGES!” It’s ok, the album survived. Haha. None of you are really old enough to know what vinyl even is, so you’ll have to ask your parents about that. hint: There’s music on the big black disk. Haha

See, told you, the album is safe and sound, back in its sleepy hole. We have something like 20,000 of them. There used to be collections like these at military bases all over the world but those have been replaced by digital systems. So there are only 2 or 3 of these collections left, so it’s actually kind of a big deal.

Anthony Bourdain visited down here back in 2017 and visited the vinyl room.

I love you all KHASBVG! Be good, and do something amazing!

“Believe you can and you’re halfway there.” – Theodore Roosevelt