Arctic 2012: Winnipeg to Ottawa

Hello my faithful blog followers (are there any?! Comment if you are!), As many of you know, I am participating in my FOURTH Students On Ice Arctic Exepedition (check out the details at www.studentsonice.com/arctic2012). But this year, I am NOT making the promise to blog every day - for one main reason only. As one quick glance at LAST year's expedition will tell you, keeping up a daily blog is exhausting. And this year, I promised myself I wouldn't do that. Yet here I am. Oh, well, glutton for punishment. Today was a fairly low-key day. Did the 90-minute-delayed direct flight from Winnipeg to Ottawa, cabbed it to Carleton University - our home for the next four nights - and then met up with the trickle of students and staff already in town. The four students (now 5!) are all from northern communities and needed to get passports done so they can travel to Greenland with the expedition (yes, GREEEEEENLAND!). We grabbed some dinner and then headed to the Parliament Buildings to see the Mosaika light show. If you ever get a chance to get to Ottawa - see this show! It's quite well done with a nice tour through Canada's history and diversity. Tomorrow it's off to the Canadian Museum of Nature, followed by visits to numerous Inuit resource places throughout Ottawa followed by an evening swim. Woo hoo. Anyone who also follows me on Facebook has probably already seen numrous posts with a weird image of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield in them. Mini-Chris, as I like to call him, will be traveling on expedition with me. It's a publicity event for the REAL Chris Hadfield's eventual launch to the International Space Station later this year. I've attached a picture (hopefully) to this entry. OK, off to bed. Sleep is a precious commodity.