After watching Phil’s early morning bed hurdling to turn off our alarms which went off in sync at 5:30, something he must be accustomed to being an Apache helicopter pilot in the Army, we quickly ate our breakfasts before heading to the airport for our two flights to Tromso.

As we headed through the airport, Katrina and myself decided to head to Duty free to cover ourselves in our favourite perfume and aftershave samples. As we wouldn’t have the luxury of showers or facility to wash ourselves though out the trek, this was our last chance to smell nice and clean, so we covered ourselves as much as we could. This resulted in lots of nice compliments from our fellow Polarists as we waited to board our final flight to Tromso.

Our flights was followed by a bus journey to Tamok valley close to Signaldalen. This was to be our base for first night and to focus on the practical training of using the gasoline stoves, how to handle the dog sleds and of course how to build our Akka Endurance 3 tents, which would be our home for next 3 nights prior to our last night with no tents. We weren’t expecting to spend this night in a tent as they hadn’t done it like this in previous years, but after our expert tuition from Johan Skullman we had nothing to worry about.

After me and Phil had put up our tent and dug our trench inside, we went to have a look at our new team mates, Madeleine and Jostein’s tent. You could tell they had both done this kind of thing before in winter conditions. Jostein had managed to skilfully craft a nice snow table and chair setup for their trench in the tent, the only thing missing was a nicely lit candle on the table. It was perfect. And Madeleine put her gardening skills to good use by creating a nice ice rockery garden and snow wall by their tent entrance.

We were then introduced to our team musher Amanda, who was born in Scotland but has been living in Norway now for over 19 years. She then went through how we were to handle our dogs sleds during our trek, with the most important thing being to never let go of the sled no matter what. I then asked her the question that we were all thinking. ”What do we do if we needed to go to the toilet while we are on the sled?

As we would travelling in a line with Amanda leading, she said we just need to shout to person in front to pass message on to her down the line and then we would stop. Though I suggested that we should be given two coloured flares (yellow and brown) to fire ahead so she would know exactly what we needed to stop for. She thought this was so funny and a great idea and would pass it on to her musher friends as a possible future introduction.

After supper it was back to our tents for our first night of camping before another very early start the next day.

Next Time:

Day 3 – Let Fjällräven Polar 2014 Begin!