North Pole 03 – Off to the airport!

Greetings all!

Roberta and I have been up since 5am this morning, packing.

Today, all we do is fly to Reykjavik, Iceland. Once there we will explore for a couple of days, before heading to Oslo, and then fly further north to Svalbard. In the picture attached to this blog entry you can see our route in pink, and I put a little white dot showing approximately where the North Pole is.

We don’t head to the airport until 1pm, which implies we have lots of time. Nope. They are telling us that baggage is severely limited, and that the “line in the sand” is 36 pounds. Someone at the tour company must have a sense of humor, because they sent a checklist of things to bring, and we now have to toss out about 2/3rds of it in order to achieve the weight goal.

My laptop (Alienware) weighs almost 17 pounds. I knew it would be a problem, and ordered a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 just for the trip. It weighs a much lighter 1.7 pounds. The past two days have been consumed with me moving all of my “stuff” off my big laptop onto the tiny laptop.

Even the camera required thinking. I have a large Canon camera, with huge lenses. Roberta has been saying that I need a special solar lens to capture the eclipse. But, the camera is too large to make the trip. Argh.. what to do? I solved it by buying a tiny camera with a reasonably ok zoom lens and a solar filter that should strap onto the end of the lens. Don’t expect a great eclipse picture…. I’ll do what I can with what fits in the overloaded suitcase…

Out of curiosity, I looked at a Reykjavik webcam, and that was probably a mistake — because here’s how it looks now:

http://www.livefromiceland.is/webcams/reykjavik/

Lots of snow! I had better put the boots back into the suitcase.

Interestingly, there are non-stop flights from Seattle to Iceland. I wonder why?

OK — Roberta wants me packing, so that’s it for today. Next stop: Reykjavik!

Thank you!

Ken and Roberta Williams
MV Sans Souci