Day 0, 3/25/09 -- travel!

Ok, this post is a few days late...I'll be better in the future.

The EBEX balloon flight will be launched from a NASA facility in a town called Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The plan is that a few of us would fly in early to get everything set up and start work on the millimeter-wave receiver while the Columbia crew got the gondola up and running. Reinforcements from Minnesota would arrive roughly a week later.

Jeff, Milligan, and I left from Minneapolis on a 2:55PM flight on Southwest. A few things to note here:

1. Southwest now flies from MSP! Our (one-way) tickets to Albuquerque were only $120 apiece.

2. If, on the Southwest website, you see a fare that says "XYZ/2", run. This means the flight makes TWO stops. We didn't realize this. All of the flights from MSP go through Midway, but our flight also stopped in Kansas City. We didn't have to change planes there, but it was annoying.

3. There is no 3.

We arrived in Albuquerque at about 8:30PM and headed to the rental car office. There, we had our choice of either a silver Chevy Impala or a white Toyota Camry. Being the America-hating pinko liberals that we are, we opted for the Camry. We found out later this was a poor choice.

We met up with a friend of mine from grad school at the Frontier Restaurant on the recommendation of a friend (thanks Chris!). After dinner, we got on the road at about 10PM for the drive to Fort Sumner. We made it to the Super 8 motel in Fort Sumner at about 1AM, where we were pleasantly surprised to find free wifi...which, of course, meant that I stayed up for nearly another hour.