No-fly day

Message from "Sledge Echo" - 24/01/2012:

Today we were supposed to fly to the Latady Mountains, to our next camp site. We were up until 1.30am sorting out a skiway for the plane - that involves running a skidoo up and down in straight lines to make a snow-runway, which needs to be smooth. Roger had to do a lot of digging to get rid of the nasty sastrugi. We were tired after that, but then we had to be up at 6.45am to give weather observations to Rothera. When you want to fly, you have to do these observations every hour until the planes are safely back at Rothera after moving you. It's a big bind! But after the 9am weather observations, they said we should stand down because the weather was not good enough....and sure enough, the cloud came in and the contrast went poor. So it was another day of sticking around camp. We did some more work on the skiway, and I read my book and wrote up my notes. I think we are both rather exhausted now, and in many ways it would be good to miss out the last part of the work and return straight to Rothera - we may have to do just that if the weather is not good enough for us to move our camp later this week. I think we'll give it a few more days first before making that decision though.

So, the next week will be full of uncertainty and surprises, no doubt. I wish I could look into a crystal ball to know what will happen. I also wish I could have a magic carpet so I could fly anywhere I liked. Home would be top of my list......counting down now!