Finally the ship itself was ready to go, and our problems focussed on the weather. At this stage weather is an important factor in all plans of trans-oceanic flying. Supplementing the meagre reports available from ships to the Weather Bureau, the Friendship’s backers arranged a service of their own. Special digests of the British reports were cabled to New York each morning, and meteorological data were radioed in from the ships at sea. All this information, supplementing that already at hand, was then coordinated and plotted out in the New York office of the United States Weather Bureau. There we came to feel that no flight could have a better friend than Dr. James H. Kimball, whose interest and unfailing helpfulness were indispensable. The weather service for a flight such as ours must be largely planned and entirely underwritten by the backers of the flight itself. And, like so much else, it is an expensive undertaking. Nearly three weeks dragged by in Boston. Sometimes Mr. and Mrs. Layman were there, hoping for an immediate take-off, sometimes Mrs. Putnam. Commander Elmer and Mr. Putnam were on hand constantly. Mrs. Guest’s sons, Winston and Raymond, followed the preparations as closely as they dared without risking disclosure of the ownership. It was during this period that I had the pleasure of seeing something of Commander and Mrs. Byrd, at their Brimmer Street home, just then bursting with the preparations for his Antarctic expedition—a place of tents and furs, specially devised instruments, concentrated foodstuffs, and all the rest of the paraphernalia which makes the practical, and sometimes the picturesque, background of a great expedition. There I met “Scotty” Allan, famous Alaskan dog driver, who was advising Byrd as to canine preparations. The weather remained persistently unfavorable. When it was right in Boston, the mid-Atlantic was forbidding. I have a memory of long grey days which had a way of dampening our spirits against our best efforts to be cheerful. We tried to be casual by keeping occupied. On fair days my battered Kissel roadster, dubbed “Yellow Peril,” was a means for sightseeing. On rainy days the top leaked too much for comfort, so we walked. We tried restaurants of all nationalities for variety and went, I think, to all the theatres.