Does anyone have a good synonym for 'unusual'?

As we all know, every great expedition/venture/adventure/project/trip needs a good, solid, memorable tagline. (This must also be as hashtag-able and/or cheesy as possible apparently).

Our meeting today was the first with all the members of our final team together. Kieran and Iwan are our 'new' members as the were not part of our preliminary planning last year - this was the opportunity to get them up to speed with everything, delegate the first lot of essential tasks for the next few weeks and most importantly decide on a nicely framed team aim.

We are heading off to do something we've never done before in a place we've never been to in crafts we've never used before! (Although we should hopefully have had a practice exped in the packrafts before June!) We want this expedition to be about inspiring others to follow in our footsteps, take the leap and go out to explore the lesser known, more unusual wild parts of the world in ways not everyone would always expect.

'Inspiring people to explore wild places in unexpected ways'

- There and Pack Again, Iceland, 2018

I've never seen so many adjectives thrown on a board before we settled on this! Unusual places? Strange crafts? Inspire? Promote? Also, there was a fairly serious argument over whether it should be 'the wild places' or 'wild places'... Jordan won that one.

It wasn't all fun and word-games though! We've got some serious work to do as well...

We're currently looking into sponsorship potential - especially with smaller, independent businesses - as well as grant opportunities. Our expectations for grants are fairly low as the time scale, and lack of a green light before Christmas has meant that we have missed a lot of the 2018 grant deadlines - however, we will be fundraising in other ways too!

The other important job is to work out (or try to) whether or not we have any hope in actually reaching the bottom of Lake Langisjor by road, and so be able to follow plan A! We will be using Land.info and other satellite imaging sites as well as past weather and road reports to try and build up a picture of what the conditions are likely to be.

Why does nobody want to photograph Lake Langisjor is high resolution???

The problem is that there's not really any way of knowing whether the road will be open at that time of year. With June being typically the peak of glacial melting, the rivers will incredibly high and the roads possibly flooded. If this is the case this will mean we will either have to walk in from closer to the main road and not venture as far into the interior (Plan B), or adjust our plans completely and run with Plan C (still to be decided).

For now we need to get cracking on securing external supports, deciding on equipment and sourcing it and putting together a really solid and presentable Plan A, B and C (and possibly the rest as well... ) to make sure that whatever the unpredictable Icelandic weather throws at us we'll be able to get through it in style!