Today I’m headed to Winnipeg, Canada, where I’ll be meeting Buchachon Petthanya, the winner of our My Favorite Things photo contest. He’s coming all the way from Thailand — and here’s a little travel alert that made for a bit of excitement on our end. If US visas are required to visit the US, then they are now also required for any connecting flights through the US. This was something we didn’t discover until Buchachon was checking in at the airport. Argghhhhh!
Thanks to a great ticket agent at United Airlines, we averted disaster and got Buchachon rerouted through Tronto instead of Seattle. Here’s a picture of him receiving some of the other prizes from Dejchart Buranabunpot, our distributor in Thailand.
During the trip, we’ll be spending a couple of days on one of the Tundra Buggys, operated by Frontiers North Adventures. These are really cool, monster Humvees — and should give us some great photo ops with the polar bears. We’ll also be catching up with the kids from the Project Polar Bear Contest and the folks from Polar Bears International. To say that I’m excited is an understatement!
For this trip, I’m packing my Fastpack 350 — and it’s packed to the gills. I have a Canon T1i with two lenses — a 28-300mm and a 16-35mm; a Canon SD1200 IS point & shoot, an Exacti compact camcorder, a laptop, card reader, extra batteries and chargers, cords, cables and adapters — plus all my personal stuff. Did I mention before that I never quite learned how to pack light? Amazingly enough, with the padded waistbelt, it doesn’t feel heavy at all.
So watch this space over the next few days. I’ll be sharing pictures and hopefully video of our adventure up north.
