The Journey North Begins

After so many years planning, it seems strange to be sat in Lord Elgin Hotel in Ottawa knowing that the expedition will be starting soon.    The Lord Elgin is a large imposing building in central Ottawa, a few doors down the street from the British High Commission.  The hotel is outstanding, the staff could not be more helpful (the rooms are spacious and our kit is already spread across them), and for a caffeine addict such as myself, there is even a Starbucks in the lobby!!!  It is an incongruous place to start such an extreme expedition.  We also triggered our Yellowbrick tracker, so you can see where we are on Google Earth (our intention is to trigger the tracker every time we move location over the next few days).

The pressure and stresses of the last few weeks have all but disappeared and we are both looking both happier and more focused.  The journey over with Air Canada was easy and we were both hugely appreciative that Oliver Shepard, from the Transglobe Expedition Trust (one of our sponsors), came to see us of from Heathrow.  Oliver has been a source of both advice and a good sounding board over the past year.

So what are our plans over the next few days?  Today we plan to visit the High Commission, and then begin to sort out the media equipment and form a basic shot list.  The plan being to make sure that we have what we need to do written down so that when we are tired we don’t have to use a great deal of brain power (some may argue that this is the case much of the time) for the filming.  We will also start to formulate the key events which we will blog about, so please if you have any suggestions please leave a comment on the Blogspot blog.  We also need to chase down our freight today (which is being very kindly shipped by DHL) to ensure that it is where we need it to be. 

Later today we are meeting with 2 guys for dinner who have been extremely helpful in our preparations.  One of them, Richard Selleck (a local expedition outfitter), has been extremely helpful in ensuring that our logistics and ‘life-support’ for when we are at Resolute Bay is organised.  Without the help of people like Richard the preparations would have been made that much more difficult.

We are then off to spend a weekend with an Arctic guide, Richard Weber, for some last minute tips on polar bears, swimming and how to make your live more bearable on the ice cap.  We are both looking forward to absorbing as much information as we can from an extremely experienced and helpful individual.  Then, after a few days back in Ottawa it will be a drive over to Trenton to catch our flight up to Resolute Bay.

The blogs will start to get more interesting and detailed as the days move on.  We will start to concentrate on specific aspects of equipment and planning over the next few days; this will allow us to give you a better idea of what we are doing, the equipment we are using and more importantly how we plan to use and why.

And on that note I am off for my first coffee of the morning, as I am blogging this at 6AM (the joys of jetlag!).