North Pole veteran and recent South Pole ski record setter Richard Weber, works with our skis.
by John Huston
Location: Ottawa, Canada
Audio Blog Contents: Visit with Richard Weber, polar expedition equipment, expedition knowledge, car loaded with expedition food, looking forward to hot tub, flight to Iqaluit on Thursday morning
Audio Dispatch Transcript:
"Hi, this is John calling in from Ottawa. It is 8:30 EST time and Tyler and I have just returned to our hotel room near the airport after a day of driving all over Ottawa and parts of Quebec.
The highlight of the day was meeting with Richard Weber, his wife Josee and his sons Tessum and Nansen at their home about 45 minutes north of the city of Ottawa. They live in a wooded area. It's a beautiful place with cross country ski trails, a nice house and a garage/barn full of polar expedition and cross country ski equipment.
Richard has been one of our mentors. He supplies us with a lot of his knowledge about expeditions and the Arctic ocean and he also supplies us with most of our diet as far our main sustenance of pemican truffles for lunch and also bacon which we also eat for lunch. Instead of reinventing the wheel we had tried out Richard's diet and known that it's been successful on several previous trips so we decided to go with that rather than waste our time trying to pack 7000-8000 calories into about 2 1/2 pounds.
So it was fantastic to sit with Richard and talk about the expedition once again and then drive away with the car completely full of meat products and butter based foods. Tyler picked out a book today and we are both a bit run down as at least maybe a little bit road weary so we are going to hit the hot tub. And we moved our flights to Iqaluit Thursday morning so we can make sure that our sleds clear customs nice and smoothly.
Well it's going well and we feel good about everything.
We miss everybody back home and things are on track. Talk to you soon."