Mission Accomplished!
by John Huston
April 25th, Day 55 of the Victorinox North Pole '09 Expedition. Position: the North Pole. Miles to the North Pole: zero. At exactly 5:30pm Central Time, the Victorinox North Pole '09 Expedition reached its destination by stepping on the North Pole itself. The last four days have been an absolute blur for Tyler and I. We slept a total of 3 hours and pushed our bodies and minds to the limit in order to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds of sea ice drift and pretty much inclement weather. As you can tell from my tone of voice, we are exhausted; we are so tired we don't know how tired we are. And we are enjoying our last meal in the tent together and having special dessert treats, a tiny bit of scotch and munching on a little bit of chocolate that is left over from lunch. We have a fantastic feeling of satisfaction and of freedom from our powerful routines that propelled us to the North Pole and through some very challenging circumstances. And that freedom comes in the form of we can now relax and not just move onto the next step all the time. And that is a really good feeling to step outside of the structure of the expedition.
We'll have some more reflection in the coming days. Tyler and I are picked up by a Russian helicopter tomorrow at 10am Norwegian time. And then we fly to the archipelago of Svalbard, 78 degrees North or so that is owned by Norway and then fly to Oslo the next day where our friends, families and loved ones are waiting for us for a celebration and then homecoming back to America a week later or so. So don't go away. We have more blogs coming and we just wanted to announce that we are very pleased that the Victorinox North Pole ‘09 Expedition was successful and will continue to be so.
We'd like to thank our major sponsors, Victorinox Swiss Army, Bergans of Norway, our official performance outerwear sponsor, and Delorme, maker of the PN40 GPS which located the North Pole for us today at 5:30pm and CaringBridge, our charity partner. We would like to remind everybody to go to www.CaringBridge.org or to click on the CaringBridge link at our website www.northpole09.com to support our effort to raise money and awareness for CaringBridge, an absolutely wonderful charity that can benefit anyone in life. They provide free personalized website for individuals and families in health crisis, treatment or recovery.
Also we like to give a big warm thank you to our office staff, people who volunteer their time or who work tirelessly to put out the blogs and support us when we were on the ice. Kristin Daniels is our office manager. She is the one running the website and running all the little knick-knacks that go with the administrative side of the expedition. Julie Hignell, who lives in Northern Minnesota, was our safety and logistics coordinator. Her advice has been invaluable and so is her positive voice on the other end of the phone. Mark De Keyser, who lives in Belgium, provided us with expert weather forecast the whole expedition. Jack Klobucar, of Added Value, Inc. out of Minneapolis, is our PR and marketing consultant. Thanks. There are so many other people to thank but those people are directly working with us.
Whoa, that was a hard trip. We're going to bed and are very, very, very happy to do so. We apologize for not sending too many photos the past two weeks. Our electronic, little computer gadget kept malfunctioning so we stopped and focused on skiing instead.
Ok. Talk to you soon everybody and ‘hello' from Tyler. Bye bye.
Daily Expedition Data
Date: April 25, 2009
Location: N90° 0.0'
Time Traveled: 16 hrs 15 minutes
Start: 1:15am (2/25)
End: 5:30pm (2/25)
gentle NW winds, misty sky, sun shining through clouds
0 nautical miles to the North Pole
John and Tyler are committed to raising
funds and awareness for CaringBridge.