Breathing in the earthy aromas and taking in the verdant scenery of the Riccarton Bush.

We finished our excursion at the restaurant housed in the old Dean residence, which had some of the best eggplant lasagna, chocolate dessert and apricot tea ever. And we sat in the middle of a rose garden, under an arbor topped with pink blooms. What a perfect closing parenthesis to our Antarctic experience.

Taking time.

Shilpa, Kristof and Chris enjoy a luncheon with tea under the arbor in the rose garden.

The most striking impressions: the muggyness when I got off the plane, the smell of grass and flowers stepping out of the airport, the currently impending darkness of night. My first nightfall since mid-October.

I gave Chris his camera back, haven’t gotten mine working yet, and didn’t ask anyone for their photos before they headed off to bed, so no pictures from today.

The SCINI vehicle in the test tank at MBARI (my old playing grounds while doing my thesis). Courtesy Stacey Kim, Moss Landing Marine Labs.

Then tonight, Peter and Bill gave the Sunday Science Lecture on ENDURANCE. The lectures are open to the entire McMurdo community and are held in the Galley. It was pretty impressive to see all the work that we’ve done over the past 6 weeks—the past two years, in fact—summarized and displayed. The Galley was full, and there were a lot of interesting questions. The lecture was recorded, and should be viewable on the McMurdo Station server in a few days.

The awesome poster we got made to advertise the Sunday Night Science Lecture. That's Bill Stone doing Slim Pickens.

Tomorrow, Peter, Chris, Shilpa and I pack our bags and get ready to leave for New Zealand on Tuesday. The remaining team stays for another five days and prepares ENDURANCE and all accompanying cargo for shipment back to the US.

Shilpa got the window seat on the ride back from Lake Bonney to McMurdo.

My view wasn't quite as good.

After a 32 minute flight, we arrived in McMurdo. Just like when we arrived at the beginning of the season, it felt like we’d been gone a long time, but yet had never left. We all took showers, did some laundry, ate some fresh fruit and salad in the Galley, and once again took up the accoutrements of normal, civilized life.

My bed in the Bunk Room in the dorm called Hotel California, where Chris, Maciej, Jim and I have been put. There have been weather delays of more than a month for some of the large parties going out to the field this year, and the town is bursting at the seams trying to accommodate everyone.

Kristof, Chris, Emma, Vickie, Rachel, Shilpa, Peter and Bill pose with ENDURANCE after its final mission.

Then it was time to start packing up. ENDURANCE is much too heavy, and has too many fragile instruments, to be transported fully assembled. The syntactic flotation has to come off, the sonde, DVL, USBL, cameras, batteries, etc., have to be removed and packed up. So we spent the rest of the day making sure we’d be ready for the first sets of helo flights of our stuff scheduled to go out tomorrow.

I work on removing one of the syntactic flotation blocks.

Bill, Peter and Chris working on packing the syntactic blocks into boxes for shipment back to McMurdo.

Peter, Emma and Bill working on disassembling ENDURANCE and packing up the 'bothouse.

The Zen Garden, that is. Behind the ridge above Lake Bonney Camp, about half-way up the side of the valley, is a wide shelf covered with the cinders from a small cone further up the mountainside, undisturbed for millions of years by water or ice. Only the howling Antarctic winds have come through and carved amazing shaped out of the larger boulders which lie strewn about on the bed of small reddish pumice pebbles. It truly bears an uncanny resemblance to a manicured Japanese sculpture garden, and last Saturday, when we celebrated Thanksgiving, it became the goal of a small hike I took in the afternoon. It was probably the most unforgettable place I’ve ever been.

The high shelf holding the Zen Garden. The cinder cone on the side of the mountain to the right of the Sollas Glacier is the source of the reddish pebble field covering the plain below. The boulders are chunks of the surrounding bedrock.

A typical view in the Zen Garden.

I had the best time running around from rock to rock. This one rested just so, that one had ridiculous holes carved through it, the view behind that one was stunning. Each was better than the next.

The fragile shapes left by the carving of the wind are completely unbelievable. This was once a four-foot diameter boulder. The wispy shell is all that remains.

The Zen Master contemplating the oneness of all existence.

Missions have become much less stressfull. As opposed to the early days where we were constantly monitoring telemetry, issuing commands for things that ENDURANCE couldn’t yet do on its own, tracking from the surface to make sure we had exact GPS coordinates for sonde drops, the ‘bot is now pretty much off on its own.

Bill, Chris, Shilpa, and Peter watching the sonar data visualizer, waiting around for the 'bot to finish its mission.

For a change, Vickie gets a rest and Shilpa tends the fiber while the 'bot is out doing its rounds. Up till recently, Vickie would be out on the ice tracking the 'bot's magnetic beacon and getting GPS fixes for sonde drop locations, and Shilpa would be at mission control checking telemetry, issuing commands, writing comments in the data log, etc.

Hmm, Shilpa doing the fiber tending seems to have a calming effect on everyone.

Well, not on everyone. (Bill doing push-ups).