So, last week my dad and I went out to dinner with our future team mates – Sheikh Mohammed Al Thani, Raed Zidan and Masoud Kalafchi. Moe (Mohammed) being Qatari and UAE royal family. We were treated to dinner at the golf and shooting club that he owns, and were waited on incredibly. But the best was yet to come: We went shooting with them, and I was able to use handguns, rifles, and Moe’s own personalised 9mm handgun! With such a lovely night and a great group of people that we’ll know on our Vinson team I didn’t stop grinning the whole way home.

Then I flew to the UK for a quick visit to have two interviews at Cambridge university. But instead of the expected 100% focus on that, I was called from Dubai at 6:30am on the day of the interview for a live radio interview on Dubai Eye! I actually really enjoyed it! I then went off to my interviews at a really beautiful castle-like college called Girton… On the drive back from Cambridge we then had to pull off into a side street for ANOTHER live radio interview with the late night show also on Dubai Eye! Again, a really enjoyable experience and hopefully we will be back on the show sometime after Vinson with the rest of the family (these ones were with my dad).

To top it all off, having arrived back from the UK yesterday, found out I’ve got an interview with another university today, and I fly out to Australia tomorrow night, and will have visited each of the seven continents by the end of the month. That kinda seems like a life goal, it seems so momentous, and I get to tick it off! Wow. Privileged much.

Anyway, off to read the BMC Summit magazine to get some tips and inspirational stories before we head off tomorrow. I’ll also be starting to upload these to facebook and to blog daily for the climbing trip – it’ll be audio I think from Vinson, so I hope it’s clear enough I don’t think signal will be quite top notch from down there, just a feeling.

Ttfn.