Traveling South
So, today is the first travel day of our trip to McMurdo Station Antarctica. It will take a car, four airplanes, and a lot of patience to get us to our last stop before Antarctica: Christchurch, New Zealand. My day began early, putting the final touches on my packing before I met with Dr. Adam Marsh and his student Alexander. Together we drove from Delaware to Philadelphia International Airport in Pennsylvania.
Our first flight takes us from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Dallas, Texas. Can you find those on a map? It takes about three hours on the plane to make that trip. During this trip, you cross from the Eastern time zone to the Central time zone. That means that we have to adjust our watches back one hour. (My watch said 6 PM, so I had to adjust to say 5 PM.)
Have you learned about time zones yet? The basic idea is that the sun doesn't strike every town on the Earth at the same instant. So, to adjust for that, humans agree to set their clocks in each time zone so that that it is light when they are active. The only tricky part is when you call someone in another time zone or you travel between time zones, like we are doing. Just because it's your 2 pm, doesn't mean that it is everyone's 2 PM. Here's a map of the world's time zones. Do you notice anything interesting?
Click on this map of the world time zones to zoom in. Can you count how many time zones we crossed?
Our next flight is from Dallas, Texas to Los Angeles, California. So fa, everything is progressing smoothly. No delays and just another 3 hours in the plane to get us to Los Angeles International Airport. By the way, it's been an interesting adventure through some extreme weather. When we left Delaware, it was 80˚F. Dallas was 104˚F. Los Angeles was a little cooler at 63˚F!
It took two planes to get us across the United States, crossing four time zones. I was tired by the time we reached Los Angeles and we still had a long way to go!
The longest leg of our trip takes us from Los Angeles, California to Auckland, New Zealand. This is the longest leg of our plane trip - it takes 12-13 hours to get from California to New Zealand, and you have to cross the Pacific Ocean. Can you find New Zealand on a map? (Hint: It's close to Australia.) New Zealand is a great country and I hope to share more of it with you. We'll be in New Zealand for a little while, getting ready for the last leg of our trip to McMurdo Station.
How many miles do you think it is between Los Angeles, California and Auckland, New Zealand?
So, in total:
- Two hours in car
- 20 hours on four airplane flights
- 13 hours of waiting in airports
- Crossing 8 Time Zones
- Approximately 9, 525 miles
Over breakfast, Dr. Marsh mentioned that he totaled from the time he left his house in Delaware to arriving and Christchurch, New Zealand and estimates our total travel time as 45 hours! That's almost two full days of travel without a break. Fortunately, we'll be in Christchurch for a little while, so we can recover before our next flight!
P.S. If you guessed about 6,000 miles from Los Angeles to New Zealand, you're right! Pat yourself on the back!