The Whole Wide World

Who needs sleep?

For my final night of climate controlled sleep for the next three-and-a-half months, I barely slept. To be expected-adventure awaits! The program manager, Matt, picked my new cohort, Marsha, and I up at 7AM. I was running on straight adrenaline…and coffee. First we stopped at The Nature Conservancy’s (TNC) storage unit, where they kindly let me store an extra bag. Coming straight from the ice and heading straight to Denver from Hawaii in December, I had a half full bag of cold weather clothes. No need for those in Palmyra. 

Chef Zone: A trip down memory lane aisle

From the storage unit we headed to Chef Zone to pick up the food order. Everything was on trollies already so we just had to inspect and check things off to make sure they’d given us everything. The last (and only other) time I was at Chef Zone was in 2022 when I filled a couple of free months of the summer giving the carnie life a run. I accompanied, Zach, the owner of the Bacon Dog stand to resupply our fair ground foods at a fair in Lawrenceville, Georgia. The parallel brought back great memories, and they were mixed with the delirious excitement of the beginnings of another wild adventure! Combined with sleep deprivation, I was definitely all in my feels. Luckily the sun was so bright I had my sunnies on which covered my tear-filled eyes. Gratitude and awe for this amazing life that I never could have dreamed of. 

Back to Chef Zone. After collecting our order, we had a little repacking session in the parking lot. We unpacked everything from the bulk packaging and packed it strategically into cooler bags for the flight. I was even tearing the tops off of pineapples, packing the bags heavy items to light in an attempt to not smoosh our precious cargo! These were to be our only freshies for 19 people for the next month. 

Back at the Airport

From there we headed to the airport where our bougie private jet was waiting to take us (and two-grand in groceries) to paradise. Marsha and I waited in the lounge and watched as they fueled the plane and loaded our cargo. She showed me a coffee maker, which I helped myself to and only noticed the ‘staff only’ sign as I was sipping on my steamy cuppa Joe. Oops.

We boarded about an hour later…with food bags under our feet and in the aisle, it was go-time. The flight to Palmyra is 2.5 hours from Honolulu. Since it was a chartered flight we took off from a special runway on the backside of the airport, so I had a different view from the one just two days prior when I arrived in Hawaii. It was a picturesque takeoff with the lush green Ko’olau Mountains out the left side windows and the sparkling Pacific Ocean out the right. 

Go Time!

There were eight of us on the flight; Matt, Katie and Hank who all work full time for TNC along with my cohort in the galley-Marsha, the two new maintenance techs Steven and John and a Science Volunteer, Erika. It was a mix of small talk, getting to know you talk, Palmyra talk dusted with energetic excitement and a couple of poorly attempted power naps.  

Ten days prior, I took off on an ice runway at McMurdo station after a long cold dark winter, and here I was about to land on a crushed coral runway on an atoll in the middle of nowhere in the South Pacific. 

Time to make up that Vitamin D deficiency!