We spent the night on Hawaii, then took off bright and early the next morning for Pago Pago, then Christchurch, New Zealand. James Cameron, the director of Titanic, was travelling with us along with a grad student from Berkley who was heading to McMurdo with parts of a telescope that was going to be installed at the base.

Just after we took off from Hawaii, I was squirreled away up on the flight deck. There is an odd little bunk bed up there, as long as I am tall, and snugged right under the fueling port. I've flown across the Pacific a number of times with the Air Force, and it can be a long flight and a bit boring sitting in a plane without windows...so, I like to lay down on the bunk for the long flight and enjoy the sights from the flight deck.

As I was laying up there, shortly after takeoff, one of the two navigator's who joined our crew in Hawaii came up to the flight deck to talk to the captain and other crew. He saw me up on the bunk and pulled a small teddy bear from his back pack and handed it to me, asking if I would look after the bear for the trip. He was one of two navigator's we had picked up for this trip who specialized in navigating the pole.

I studied the bear, and and saw that it had a back pack. Inside was a notebook with log entries from other people who had looked after the bear, and around it's neck was a tag with a letter explaining that the bear belonged to a young girl in Kansas and was part of her Geography project. She had handed the bear off to a commercial crew leaving Kansas nearly a year ago, with a special request that the crew hand it off to someone else who would record where the bear went and so on. I read some of the entries of where this little bear had been. From Kansas he'd gone to Germany and Norway, and then the military picked him up and he'd visited areas at war in Bosnia. The letter asked if whoever had the bear on a date about 6 weeks away would be kind enough to mail it back to her, she was going to use the log entries to plot on maps where the bear had been.

Now I was going to take him to the pole.