Day 9-October 19th '11

Day 9- October 19^th ‘11

Today I’m riding along with Talia on a “crew tour”.

When a C-17 is scheduled in for a landing the Air Force/ National Guard Commanding Officer emails ahead of time and asks if a certain number of the crew can tour the town. So Air Services (me/us) schedule a van from Shuttles and when the plane is on final approach, we go to the Ice Runway and pick up the few military crews taking the tour.

The tour consists of driving by significant buildings, pointing out historical sites and answering questions about town life. We stop at the McMurdo sign overlooking the Discovery Hut while they take pictures or have us take pictures of them. Pictures like this are called the “Hero Shot”. I’ve heard tell of some people who do these pix in little to no clothing. These are then called the “Super Hero Shot”. Luckily these guys weren’t into that today on this very freezing cold day with cutting wind.

After the pictures we take them to the store, which we have prearranged to be open for them to have the store to themselves to shop. It’s like having a private shopping spree, where we get asked what we would like if we were one of their wives, girlfriends or kids.

When shopping is done, we take them back to the runway and their plane that has been unloaded, reloaded and fueled. At this time they will ask for their passports to be stamped.

In actuality, it isn’t an official stamp. Only Thailand has shown any displeasure about someone’s passport having this stamp that is simply the post office’s stamp cancelling stamp. But everyone wants it to show them having been on this continent. So I stamped the crew’s that were in the van and the pilot ( captain) tells me that there are other crew still on board that would like to be stamped also. So he invites me aboard the C-17 to stamp the rest of the crew’s passports. The captain also asked if he could take my picture with my camera with the plane in the background. Super nice guy.

So I went into this hulking cargo plane and stamped with pleasure, passports of some of our finest military personnel. Though I’m not a customs agent or official immigration officer, I was happy to do that for them.

It was a great day!