Further delays, walking around Christchurch...

When traveling to the ice, it's not uncommon to meet up with many others, also making the journey.  I sometimes start seeing other Antarctic program folks as early as LA, but more often in Sydney or Auckland, and definitely in Christchurch.  By now, in Christchurch, there are a few dozen participants (at least) trying to go South. 

So it's not that uncommon to hear the rumor that a flight has been delayed or cancelled, and the phone call came for me in late morning.  So now we're currently scheduled another day out, meaning hopefully flying on Saturday.  Of course they haven't gotten so formal as to give us a flight time yet, so I'm considering this quite tentative. 

I spent most of the day walking today, around town.  In the morning I went in search of a good bakery, and ended up with a ~3 mile round-trip:

The pie at the bakery was well worth the walk! 

Then in the afternoon I wanted to get down to see the Christchurch Botanical Gardens, which I've always enjoyed.  Then I went over to take a look at the progress on rebuilding the city centre (as they spell it here), stopped in at re:start, an outdoor mall made entirely out of shipping containers.    It's amazing what they do with shipping containers in this city.  Also along the way, it was really neat to see how they've brought art into the public spaces that are left open where buildings have been removed- the GapFiller project in particular hosts a wide variety of items, including one that I passed, the 'dance-o-mat' which is a dance floor with amplified speakers and lighting, coin operated and you plug in your own music player.  Of course it uses the chassis of a washing machine to house the electronics. 

It turned out to be a relatively long walk, but again, well worth it!  The total for the day ended up at around 11 miles...  nice to stretch my legs after all that flying!