I really want to write a post about our next expedition but unfortunately Katie (also known as Hitler on occasions) has said that we have to wait so instead I thought I would tell you about the highlights of our trip to France.

In a very respectable third place comes the weather. I don’t know about you but there is something spectacular about the weather in the Mountains at this time of year (spring that is). Not only is it the perfect temperature but the snow is just great for touring and the air is half filled with the smell of summer coming up from the valleys below.

In second place is Katie’s face as she learnt to abseil without a harness. Slightly harsh I know, but it was one of the funniest things I’ve seen for a while. It’s an incredibly important skill to know in climbing and mountaineering expeditions in case something should happen to your harness and you need to get down a vertical cliff. As a general rule I use a technique called ‘South African abseiling’, quite why it has that name I don’t know. What I do know is how painful it is! Katie managed to get to a point where it hurt so much that you start laughing at the ridiculous amount of pain and you are torn between been afraid of going any further and knowing that down is the only way for the agony to end. Sadly I didn’t have a camera to hand and so you will simply have to imagine it.

And in first place was the acquisition of the most ridiculously large printer ever. My Dad owns a print house in the Alps and he very kindly donated an old printer to us so we could print out proposals and promotional material for our expeditions. It is a truly fantastic toy! And with typical disregard for the cost of the inks I set about printing the largest pictures I could to test out our new gadget. I have since discovered that it will print 36 inches wide and a fairly respectable 300ft long. We now have hundreds of huge maps and prints all around the flat and not enough wall space to put them up. The only down side of it is that Katie isn’t overly impressed about the fact that it occupies a huge portion of the house now!

The journey home was very smooth and easy with the exception of 2 very surreal moments. The first was the check in at Resolute!!! The lady who was responsible for checking us in for our ‘First Air’ flight from Resolute to Iqaluit has managed to build herself quite an exceptional reputation. To say that she is a little on the slow side would just not do her justice. There are 4 flights a week out of Resolute with a maximum of 8 passengers per plane and she is single headedly responsible for delaying 97% of all the flights. Being fully aware of her exceptional talent we arrived 3 hours early for our flight and stood at the check in desk in a bid not to miss our connection in Ottawa. The situation was looking promising as there were only 5 of us on the flight. After 48mins the situation began to deteriorate as she was still trying to check the first person in. There was a long debate as she tried to justify why she was charging us for luggage and ticket alteration fees and a whole host of other penalties that she then promptly forgot to actually put through the system. I suspect the whole situation wasn’t helped when after 80 mins Charlie could no longer hold back the flood of irritation that had been building up inside and started asking what on earth she was doing and whether she thought she could work at MIT. Needless to say we just became another statistic and a mere 40 mins late we finally managed to take off with all our bags and passengers.

We were fully aware that we had some excess luggage when we started the journey however when we came to check it in to Air Canada in Ottawa we came very close to just leaving it in the airport. At first I laughed at the man because his accent was so strong that I thought he had simply made a mistake and the translation was lost in his deep French pronunciation. After some clarification we all stood in total silence as they wanted more for each bag than the original cost of the flights. Once again Charlie launched into a full frontal verbal assault at the man, this time however the conflict of the strong French and Scottish accents nullified each other and they both just displayed a look saying ‘I’m sorry, are you speaking to me? I’m afraid I didn’t understand’. At that point the credit cards came out and we swiftly moved on.

Home hasn’t exactly been relaxing yet and we took Easter Sunday off before getting back to work on Monday. We are off to France tomorrow to see my family and enjoy a few days training in the warm and the sun.