Today was an absolutely fantastic day.

Breakfast was bread with meat and cheese, bread with cheese, bread with margarine and bread with nutella. After that I got ready to go dog-sledding, which meant putting on everything I had. Nikki, Kanako, Allen and I met the guy and headed off to put on MORE gear – coveralls, their boots, their mittens, a ski mask, hat, and goggles. We were extremely toasty. We drove out to the kennel, got shown the basics of the sleds and started to harness the dogs. Allen and I's team, starting at the front, was Venus and Cartman, Tequila and Fry, and Kauto and Embla. I hooked up Venus and Fry. Fry was eager to get in that harness, it was funny, he almost helped me along with it. Once we got him hooked up though, he was actually a pretty whiny dog, at least at first. Allen drove first and off we went... and our dogs immediately became a pile of fighting. Our sled actually ended up ON Kauto's head, and I was horrified we were going to kill him, but the dogs were all fine once we got them separated, amazingly. We hadn't gotten too much further before Tequila got her leg over the line, and I had to get out and fix that. From there it was pretty good going for a while, sitting in that sled is surprisingly relaxing. I almost could have taken a nap. I got lots of good pictures, though my fingers felt frozen and I ended up having to make the trade-off of the warmth of their mittens (my gloves didn't fit under) for the lack of coordination. Still figured out how to take pictures with the mittens on though, even if I did get a lot of lens errors. I even have a few videos.

The dogs got fighting again, and this time one of our two guides (Ruben, only with more accents, who was from Stockholm, and Richard, I dunno where he was from), it was Richard, came back and switched Cartman and Fry. It was a lot smoother going after that, Cartman had been the troublemaker. We didn't really see anything else alive other than another team of dog-sleds at one point, but the landscape was just beautiful. Textbook glacial valleys covered in snow. Eventually we turned around, they did a good job making sure we'd catch our plane, and I switched to driver. It was surprisingly easy, the dogs know the route, all you have to do is brake occasionally. The girls ahead of us had a better lead this time than the way out, so I didn't even have to brake half as often as Allen had.

We got back in and unharnessed the dogs, I put away Embla, Tequila and Venus. (I just noticed now Allen put away all three boys and I put away all three girls). Then we fed the dogs, which was interesting. One dog, Frigg, caught my attention. The rest of the dogs would jump and yelp and try to get your attention, but not Frigg. No, she just watched me and waited. She knew it was coming. She actually hadn't eaten much of it by the time we left either, which I thought was interesting. (For those who know Norse mythology, there was also a Loke, a Balder, and a Froya, only the o has a slash through it).

Then it was time to head back, strip our gear, thank Ruben with many accents (who told us a great story about doing a sauna in Northern Sweden, going outside to cool down, and getting his hand stuck to the door on the way back in), struggle to find my lunch (I never did, but a few people had extra stuff so I got a full meal), get our bags, onto the bus, to the airport. In Tromso we had to go through customs and check-in and security all over again, I was afraid we wouldn't make our plane, but we did, and that's where I am now.

Monday, March 29th, roughly 5:30 PM local time