Prep day 3: Done packing

Finally we are done with packing.  The boxes are ready to be shipped to Union Glacier base camp when we get to fly there. Each of my day bag of food now weighs about 1.5 kg (3.3 lbs) and that does not count the fruits and nuts, salami, cheese and other things. I expect it to go up to 1.7 kg per day.  Let say average about 1.6 kg/day, I would consume 80 kg (176 lbs) of food by the end of the trip. Because we have so much food, we are going to drink at least 5 liters of water per day.  This is a lot of number ones and twos to have :).

We are using this tent on the ice

We practiced pitching the tents we are going to use in Antarctica. Some of us have not used this tunnel tent before so there are a few things to know about them and do's and dont's while on the ice.  I used the same tent last time, and I own one myself, so it's no brainer.  

One thing that was fun was playing around with fire. One would have to be careful with the stove that sits inside the tent in the vestibule. Emma's polar training course on starting the stove procedure seems to be a little different from how we are going to actually use it on the ice, which is kind of interesting to me.  Not sure if people who gave the training have done this type of trip before.

Each of us haul a sled like this full of stuffs for 50 days

The real fun thing today though was a trip to pay tribute to Magellan at his statue downtown Punta Arenas to ask for a safe passage. This is a tradition to some skiers to the South Pole apparently. We had fun rubbing the toe of the Patagonian statue below Magellan.

Since we are finished with the packing, it's nice to have the next couple of days to work on customized stuffs on gears, and clothing.

We are scheduled to fly to Union Glacier base camp on Saturday but historically, the flight to Antarctica are always delayed due to weather.