Needham Woman Heads To Antarctica For 4 Months
BOSTON (CBS) – A Needham woman is off on the trip of a lifetime and she'd better dress warm.
Jamie Clark left Logan Airport Monday for the long journey to Antarctica.
Clark talks to WBZ NewsRadio 1030's Deb Lawler
Podcast
She will spend four months working at McMurdo Station, which is the logistics hub of the U.S. Antarctic Program.
"I will be working at the commissary. There's one shop there that serves all the needs of the about 1,100 folks that live there," she told WBZ NewsRadio 1030.
"(The community) is pretty much the size of my high school, so it's kind of going to be like that again."
Clark won't arrive in Antarctica until Friday.
She'll go to Christchurch, New Zealand first, where the U.S. Antarctic Program has its off-continent base.
"That's where they do all of their preparations. They have all their extreme cold weather gear down there, which they'll issue me," Clark said.
"It's pretty unpredictable. I think some days it can get down with the wind chill to -50 or something like that."
Clark is an experienced world traveler. It started in college with a semester in South Africa.
"I just up and quit my a job a few years ago and saved up a bit of money, went over to Europe, travelled around there for a few months, made my way over to Asia, went down to Thailand and picked up a job there and then moved on to New Zealand and picked up a job there as well."
So how did she ever decide to go to Antarctica?
"A friend of mine just put the idea in my head a few years ago. She found, I guess, a website for all these service jobs down there and said 'Why don't you check this out' because she knew I liked to travel," Clark said.
"So I put in an application a few months ago, didn't hear back, figured it was not going to happen and then, out of the blue two weeks ago, I got an email about it and we're just going from there."
Clark's father Bob is a newswriter at WBZ NewsRadio 1030.
What did he think about his daughter's latest adventure?
"My father just had this look of terror, kind of, 'Oh my God' and my mother just laughed. They're pretty used to it by now."
