27th March
Today we finished the last bits of shopping in Ottawa – our last chance for 300 miles (and you thought it was a long way to the corner shop). The team spent the evening packing kit and breaking out their meals for each day. We are having an early night ready for our flight up to the Arctic tomorrow.
26th March
The food for the expeditions arrived today. We eat dehydrated vacuum packet meals which are extremely high in calories and actually pretty tasty. We’ll also snack all day to make up for the energy we’ll use, so well be buying chocolate, cheese and pepperoni by the trolley load.
The meal variety is pretty good and it needs to be! Over the next month we’ll spend hours in the tent discussing favourite sweets, puddings fresh fruits and, of course, our fantasy first meal when we get back! After a hard day’s shopping for kit we ordered room service back at the hotel - but only after discussing the relative merits of the fillet steak dip and mascarpone whipped potato.
25th March
We flew from Heathrow on Wednesday; it took us about an hour to find the long term car park where the ‘special knockdown price’ was apparently achieved by locating it in the next county… Checking-in sledges onto modern airlines is a matter of negotiation.
We were stopped by “Barbara” who took issue with both our size and weight - worrying as we had almost empty pulks (sled). By unpacking the pulk we ducked under the 30kg limit on the scales to get the rubber stamp. We then just managed to sneak all the kit back into the pulk again before it was carried off!
Ottawa was a balmy 10°C when we arrived which was a worry. We are relying on snow to get across the land on Devon Island: If we are hauling over gravel this could be a long trip.
We flew from Heathrow on Wednesday; it took us about an hour to find the long term car park where the ‘special knockdown price’ was apparently achieved by locating it in the next county… Checking-in sledges onto modern airlines is a matter of negotiation.
We were stopped by “Barbara” who took issue with both our size and weight - worrying as we had almost empty pulks (sled). By unpacking the pulk we ducked under the 30kg limit on the scales to get the rubber stamp. We then just managed to sneak all the kit back into the pulk again before it was carried off!
Ottawa was a balmy 10°C when we arrived which was a worry. We are relying on snow to get across the land on Devon Island: If we are hauling over gravel this could be a long trip.
Welcome to my blog!
I hope you enjoy tracking the progress of the expedition over the next few weeks. As you know we are trying to walk between the two most northerly Inuit settlements - Resolute Bay and Grise Fjord.
There are five of us on the expedition, Ian Hibbard, Phil de Berger and Rebecca McNight, myself and Mark Wood. Mark and I went to the Arctic in 2006 and he is now a fulltime explorer and our leader.
I plan to post an entry every couple of days (weather and technology permitting!). Straight off I’d like to thank Jon Heggie for helping me collate and moderate the blog from the UK without whom you'd get much shabbier spilling and gramma.
I reckon you'll sell more copies of the Big Issue if your Polar Bear only had 3 legs... ;-)
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