Hey All,
Rather than giving each person who asks, "Hey, how was the trip?" the same short, generic response, I'm going to give a more detailed response here so that everyone can get the full version.
Here's some statistics first:
# of days: 9
# of miles flown: ~12,000
# of flights: 6
# of miles driven: 1,500
# of hours traveled ~30 each way
# of hours of sleep while traveling: ~4 each way
# of brazilian foods and fruits eaten: many
# of instruments to install: 7
# of instruments successfully installed: 5
# of traffic violations while I was driving: 4
# of group members who got sick: 1 (me)
So basically the trip involved going to two different sites where we had shipped small cargo trailers filled with equipment. At each site we had to run power cables and convert 230 V to 115 V for all our equipment. We had to attach a clear plastic dome and a GPS antenna to the roof and get all kinds of stuff running: a MiniMe (optical instrument), a laser (for calibration), a laser shutter, pc's to record data, wireless network to transfer data. That list sounds quite a bit simpler than it was to do. Water leaked into one of the containers and damaged a few computers. One we fixed, another we swapped parts around with another one to get it running. What we weren't able to get around was that two camera controller cards went bad somewhere in transit. This meant that we weren't able to get the imager and one of the MiniMe's running. Sadly, this means that I'll have to go back later this summer :P.
It was quite an adventure. Being without a home depot equivalent posed quite a challenged when supplies were needed and/or broken. Having limited internet access posed quite a challenge when information or files were needed (2 hours to download 4 megabytes, ftl). The sun was really hot. Just a few minutes of exposure without sunscreen or a tan resulted in mild burns. The temperatures were around 85-95 degrees with humidity of 50-60%. Some days we were sweating long before we started working, others were really okay.
Hopefully next trip we'll have some time to do some sightseeing. As it was we saw some great scenery though. I'll post pictures when I get a hold of them.
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