, heading over to Derby to pick up Gill and then back to Nottingham to pick up the race bibs for the organisers, then heading north, stopping about 1:30 about 40 miles from our destination, nearly 200 drizzly miles into Scotland.I decided towards the end of 2006 that I should head back to the UK for a trip during 2007, and as the AR World Champs were taking part in Scotland at the Wilderness-ARC race, this seemed like an ideal event to try and base my trip around.
Getting on the forums at sleepmonsters.com I was talking to Samantha Mitchell about putting a team in, which unfortunately never quite happened, and then I contacted Gill Watson, who was looking for a 4th, and hooked up with inov-8/ Intellident.
A couple of months of intermittent contact culminated in me lugging 52Kg of gear onto an Air NZ flight via the intrusive farce that is a brief stop at LAX and landing in Heathrow to the joys of british 'summer'.
After a week of acclimatising and visiting a few friends in the south of the country, I headed up to Derby to meet Ifor and Gill, pack boxes, repair one of the boats and buy and bag a whole bunch of food
The official race website is at arwc2007.com, and there should be live coverage on sleepmonsters, with us being team No. 21, and the race apparently starting with the prologue at 10:00 UK time on Saturday.
Wednesday turned into a very long day, with me speding some time trying to set up elsidee.com before leaving home, picking up the camper van at Newark , heading over to Derby to pick up Gill and then back to Nottingham to pick up the race bibs for the organisers, then heading north, stopping about 1:30 about 40 miles from our destination, nearly 200 drizzly miles into Scotland.
Thursday started with finishing off that journey to Fort William, then finally meeting JC, so that I had now been introduced to the whole team 
. The day was mainly spent in the hall 
sorting kit out, apart from the odd foray out into the rain for skills tests, including capsizing the boats, and the when the sun came out, heading out to carbo load 
, before it was back into the hall, where we were trying to sort kit until past 23:00, unlike Balance Vector ( boxes in the foreground ), who had packed up and gone to the pub by about 20:00, oh for experience!