An early start on Wed morning saw us loading our gear onto the transport at 6 am. Our flight wasn't leaving Heathrow Terminal 3 until 1300 but we wanted to be there in good time and with little fuss. Arriving at 9am we unloaded our gear and then Matt used his charm to enable us to pay a reduced rate for our excess baggage charges. We then settled down and waited to board our aircraft. Our flight to Ottawa was uneventful except for some turbulence whilst crossing mid-Atlantic. We 'arrived' at Ottawa with a bump where the outside air temperature was - 11 degrees centigrade. Utilising our time to good effect we stocked up at the local grocery store for some food provisions for the expedition and doughnuts for the car. We had decided to overnight at the airport due to the early flight the next morning to Iqaluit. Rather than just sit at the airport, i told Matt that i wanted to see the a movie called 'Jack Ryan - Shadow Recruit' he agreed but was distracted by the fact i went to sleep and snored throughout, I must confess to falling asleep at the start and waking up intermittently. We then drove back to the airport with -14 being our outside air temperature. Our quiet location in the airport to bed down for the night was rumbled when at 0300 hrs we realised that the baggage weighing scales were right next to us and a large party of school children were excitedly weighing their luggage.
I woke again at 0530 (to find Matt still sat there awake) excited to find that I had a new follower on Twitter - I was less excited when I found it was Matt, however he kindly pointed out that I had to find another 600 plus followers to catch up with him.
We touched down at Iqaluit after an uneventful 3 hour flight and whilst waiting in the passenger terminal a Canadian Television crew asked us for our comments on a new flight schedule that was being introduced from Halifax to Iqaluit. I said to Matt 'Isn't Leeds Bradford the nearest airport to Halifax'? He frowned and continued watching something on his IPAD, but i did sit there finding it funny. Taking off at 1430 we began our final leg up to Resolute, stopping off at Arctic Bay for fuel, it was a crystal clear night with the sun setting as we took off for our short hop of an hour into Resolute. Landing there as the sun went down the temperature reminded us of what challenges we will have in store, it was -42 degrees centigrade, a degree less than when we arrived almost to the day last year. We drove down to our accommodation and shortly afterwards began moving our stored equipment down into the dining area and sorting it out as we prepare for our trip. I was going to finish this Blog on a high and say we are buzzing, however one of us has just been reminded of how many followers they have on Twitter, tune in tomorrow for an update on our expedition, and maybe some more information on Twitter followers.
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