Finally!

We arrived!!!! They flew us up here on a shared services plane Tuesday afternoon. We did all the normal stuff like checking our bag(s), walking through security and getting lost trying to find our gate because it had been changed in the 20 minutes since we printed out our boarding passes. Because we are smart kids, we just decided to look for the most male dominated section of the airport and then ask at the check-in counter there. We won. The flight was nice with just a little bit of turbulence, and I was asleep for most of it. After getting off the plane, I went through the smallest terminal I've ever seen and then we got driven from Deadhorse to Prudhoe Bay, about 1/2 a mile.
Everything is flat here. Everything. They say on a clear day you can see for 35 miles in any given direction. We are only 5 miles from the ocean. The reason the are we are in is called the North Slope, is because the land slopes continually down from a way-far-away mountain range to the ocean here. And it is north of the mountain range. I haven't seen any mosquitos yet, but I have seen some cute arctic foxes (do not pet either...they carry rabies) and a bunch of birds. Nothing is green here, it is technically an arctic desert and the tundra is just grassy and brown with lakes plopped in it, connected by streams. Usually this would be frozen, but the top layer of earth melts in the spring, turning everything into a marsh/swamp thing. I would put up a picture, but I cannot load my pictures onto the computers here as they are schlumberger's.
The other unique thing that I have seen is that this place only exists for one purpose. Work. All the buildings either house parts, machines, or humans. A lot of them are propped up on stilts because due the the freeze/thaw action, the ground isn't stable enough to build on. When something isn't propped up, it is because it is built on a "pad" which is a built up gravel surface. All the main buidings and roads, as well as the rig sites, are built on these. That is a lot of imported gravel.... Another thing that amazes me is that everywhere you look around, everything that is not tundra or wildlife was trucked up here. All the buildings, food, water, storage, trucks, parts, etc. And the only road up here is a very long, mult-hundreds of mile dirt road with little or no gas stations.
Lunch is happening, so I am going to check out the buffet line. That is the other awesome thing about this place...the food is AMAZING. This might not be a good thing though. Thank goodness they have ellipticals here.