On Thursday evening, I boarded Qantas Flight 18 from LAX to Sydney, Australia. The Boeing 747 departed just after midnight and landed in Sydney on Saturday morning. I had a 9.5 hour layover in Sydney, so I went through customs in Australia, checked my large carry-on bag at the airport, and took the train to Circular Quay (the Aussie pronunciation is Circle Kay). There, I wandered around the famous Sydney Opera House and Royal Botanical Gardens.

See the slideshow above for photos of my adventures around Sydney.

After a nice afternoon, I boarded my evening flight to Christchurch, New Zealand. The flight landed around midnight, and after going through customs in New Zealand, where I had to convince the agents that my JPL hardware would not harm sheep, I finally arrived at my hotel at 1 a.m. Door-to-door travel time was around 32 hours. I was on empty and enjoyed a short night’s sleep before waking up to go to the Clothing Distribution Center the following morning. Stay tuned for my next post!

TAGS:STO-2, ANTARCTICA, MCMURDO, ASTRONOMY, ASTROPHYSICS, BALLOONING

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jenna Kloosterman, NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow

  Jenna Kloosterman is a NASA postdoctoral program fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, researching new instruments for radio astronomy. For the past two years, she has worked on the Stratospheric Terahertz Observatory II, or STO-2, a balloon-born observatory designed to study how stars are born. During the Antarctic summer of 2011-2012, she spent 10 weeks at McMurdo Station for STO’s first flight and returns in November 2015 for a second. She earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, and both a master’s degree in astronomy and a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Arizona. Outside of work, she enjoys yoga, hiking, and modern dance, as well as serving as co-chair of the Caltech Postdoc Association.