Month: March 2009

Made it home! Just in time for Jaye’s visit and Torsten’s birthday (Fri). Lovely snowstorm, but great to be home!

Ah, so close, so far. It is hard to see ash clouds at night. In the picture it is hard to see the ferry which will take me to a hotel in ketchikan. I’m ready to be home, but I sure understand a pilot not wanting to fly at night towards a volcanic ash cloud. And I am definitely appreciative of the fact that a hundred years ago the trip home from Norway would be quite a bit harder!

Matt had a great, quick trip to Norway for the subglacial processes workshop at Svartissen Glacier. Here’s a set of photo highlights from the trip (next time, Carrie and Torsten are definitely going, and we’re going to stay much longer!)

In the Oslo airport (flight to Amsterdam delayed an hour…).. The snow here isn’t too bad, they are giving meal vouchers–I got selected for random screening, so it looks like my lucky day. As long as Redoubt doesn’t blow its top (the wrong direction) and the North Koreans don’t shoot down our plane, things seems good for getting home tonight (it’ll still be tonight in about 27 hours!).

Here’s today’s soundtrack (and I haven’t even gotten out the ipod yet!)

1) Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Road (what the fancy TV/alarm clock woke me up with)

2) GnR (right?) Home Sweet Home (this is what trickled into my head when I was walking from the hotel to the airport)

3) Cracker – Duty Free (This also popped into my head when I made it through customs and went on to the gate.. One thing I hate about international flights leaving Oslo is having to go through the duty free store–I want to go somewhere, not buy junk!)

I guess I should take advantage–with timezones, today will be 33 hours long total, so I can make a killer soundtrack! 🙂

Oh! Can’t do a post without a picture–here is one of my favorite meals. This was the first night in Bodo–I thought I had gone into the Thai restraunt, but was just jet lagged/confused, and ended up with this delicious shrimp/mussel/pasta bowl, great bread, and a yummy Hansa Bayer beer (in an Arctic mug).

(So far, my main regret on this trip is not connecting the friends in Norway–Adam and Carrie in Trondheim, Hans and Hao in Oslo–next time! And Carrie and Torsten will be along!)

After some nice sunny times (along with the aviation museum) in Bodo, I caught the Bus to Halsa, and got dropped off on the side of the road just past Holland (after the 7 km long tunnel just past Glomfjord–the tunnels are impressive!). I met up with other workshop-ers on the bus, and we caught the bus across the fjord to Engabreen. Here’s a “teaser” photo of the view from the tunnel portal. We stayed at the lodge on the lake opposite the glacier.

Day one of the workshop was ~2km in the tunnel, under the glacier, under 200 m of ice. So here I am, with 200 m of ice above me.

No more planes to where I’m going (just bus, boat, and helicopter yet to go). But I’ve got a full day to catch up with myself and enjoy the area. And the forecast is a full day of sun and perfect temps (hi of 0C, lo of -8C) tomorrow, what to do, what to do…

Nope, not heading south. Lots of ice over Hudson Bay. A nice little auroral breakup over Greenland almost made up for the night flight (I love flying over Greenland during the day and looking at all that ice–the flight home will be during the day). The landscapes over northern Canada reminded me of the HiRISE imagery from Mars, and you can just barely get a sense of it in the fourth picture (second plane picture, I think..)

I don’t often spend a whole lot of time in the S gate of seatac, but I’ve got two hours… So to test landscape photos and convince Dana that it is spring here–compared to the (upside down) Juneau photo, there aren’t three meter deep piles of snow on the runway here!

I’ll keep Dana guessing. But seatac is looking spring like

Testing blogging from the phone. Matt is heading out (solo 🙁 ) on the first flight of the year. Three months with no travel-wahoo!

Here’s the Juneau airport (looking towards Eaglecrest) on the first day of summer..

Settling in for almost three days of travel…