Thomson Airlines Boeing 757 Explorer One (G-OOBF)
Lima, Peru
Monday, February 8, 2010

    This will probably be a short entry in the journal. We awoke this morning to a second day of clear skies and cold temperatures. Workers had continued their toils trying to clear the roads and sidewalks as much as possible. The job is huge and will continue for days or weeks, complicated by the forecast of more snow in the next day or so.

    The good news for us was that we were able to escape Washington and begin our around the world expedition at last. As I mentioned, most of Peru had to be cancelled, but our first destination would still be Lima.

    Dulles International was in operation when we arrived and we were able to quickly check in to our special flight. Security clearance was normal and after a short wait we were ushered into one of Dulles’ people mover buses for transport to the plane that was parked out in the “north forty” somewhere. The plane is operated by Thomson Airlines out of the UK, is painted sky blue, and goes by the moniker “Explorer One”. The UK tail number is G-OOBF (golf-oscar-oscar-bravo-foxtrot). The engineers spent most of yesterday and last night digging the aircraft out of the snow that had buried it during the blizzard. As we arrived at the plane, it was dug out and in the final stages of a complete de-icing.

    The plane is a Boeing 757 with an all first-class interior in a two-by-two configuration. These are not the latest, fancy, all electronic seats, but are very comfortable. The flight to Lima was about seven and a half hours, but this time went by very quickly. We had lectures from three of the faculty, including a talk by Jay Dickman on digital photography and a talk about Peruvian history. I was also to get a lot of work done on the computer. That combined with good conversation made the trip seem shorter. The food was very good.

    About an hour before landing in Lima, the sun set dramatically in the western sky. The photo to the right shows the silhouette of our starboard wind against the glowing horizon.

    We cleared immigration (a ponderous process), collected our bags, and passed through customs. We then boarded buses that took us to the Swissôtel across town and quickly checked into our rooms. This is a very fine hotel and my room is large and comfortable. It was 10 pm by now, but they had a nice buffet dinner all ready for us at the hotel.

    Going back to my room, I found that the internet connection wasn’t working for me, so I decided to just get some sleep. The problem may be in the Ethernet connection on my computer since I also had trouble directly connecting by cable on the NG Explorer in Antarctica. I know the wireless works, so I’ll just connect next time I’m in range of a wireless network. Tomorrow morning we will do a little sightseeing, have lunch, and then it is back to our plane for the flight to Easter Island.