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	On the way to Christchurch, New Zealand     Our trip to Antarctica takes us around the world first, from St. Louis to Los Angeles, on to Auckland, New Zealand and down to Christchurch, New Zealand on the South Island.  This makes for a very long day of flying: around 4 hours to LA, 13 to Auckland, and about an hour and a half to Christchurch.  At this time of year, Christchurch is 19 hours ahead of St. Louis, which means that when you fly there from the United States, you skip one day.  So this journal will not include October 26, 2003, since for us, that day will not really exist.     Now by us, I mean myself, Lauren Scott, a fifth-year graduate student at the Washington University Laboratory for Experimental Astrophysics and Dana Braun, our group's mechanical technician whose chief responsibility for the TIGER experiment is fabricating the approximately 5000 mm2 scintillating fibers that make up the TIGER hodoscope.  We are the going to be the first people from the TIGER / ANITA / ARIA group to set foot down on the Ice at McMurdo Station this season.  It will be up to us to make sure that the TIGER instrument survived its trip from Palestine, Texas where we tested and integrated the instrument this past summer, to McMurdo Station, Antarctica where we will launch it aboard a 40-million cubic foot high-altitude balloon, courtesy of NASA's National Scientific Balloon Facility.     The TIGER detector is transported by truck to Los Angeles where it is then shipped down to Antarctica in a sea container.  Since this trip is a rough one with temperatures that can vary greatly, it is important to check the instrument and make sure that all of the approximately 600 cable connections have not come loose or that expansions and contractions due to temperature variations have not compromised the integrity of the instrument.
	Me with all my bags, outside Lambert International Airport in St. Louis	Me working on this journal entry!

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