Successful first day

Our first day has been a resounding success. And by resounding success I mean there were a series of small problems, easily overcome by our team and remote help from the amazingly excellent admins at UTIG (http://ig.utexas.edu/). After some early morning breakfast tacos at the AUS airport, we arrived at LAX at 9am and picked up our shiny red SUV, Elmo omlE. She's looking in great shape, so we'll be sure to fix that (although fingers crossed nothing that a good car wash won't fix!). We've also picked up a UT Gelogical Sciences truck and some tools to get the sensors in their cozy homes for the next couple years. It's always an interesting job when you split your tool store supply runs between Lowe's and Joann Fabrics, but such is the career path of a field seismologist.

The sensors arrived in good shape at the Fedex Freight depot. I was very nervous as I've never shipped my equipment to a freight depot before, but after a little confusion, in which somehow Caltech seismology professor extraordinaire Rob Clayton was listed as the receiving party, we were able to successfully remove our boxes from the palette and load them nicely into our trucks. Each truck now holds about 10 station boxes and the fit is amazingly perfect. I honestly couldn't have hoped for a more nicely loaded pair of trucks.

Once our trucks were loaded, we booked it out to Barstow for the night. We're pretty exhausted, so the first, and most important task was a quick nap. Once we recovered a bit, we picked up a few sundries at the pharmacy and had a fantastic dinner at a neighborhood Italian restaurant. An Italian restaurant that is a real small town gem in all but their Italian dressing, which appears to be marinara sauce with a hint of vinegar. Nonetheless, we decided to spend all our nights this week here in Barstow, rather than heading out to Needles, so we will likely be exploring their menu some more.

Tomorrow, we prepare for the team tutorial install on the west end of the line and then plan to get three more stations done for a total of four in the ground after our first day. Fingers crossed for a successful day two!

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