IWG week 7 & 8 - Excursion to Russia (Introduction)

It has been a long time since last posting. It was not my intention to keep this blog not updated for such a long time, but because of this excursion to Russian wilderness, I have been very busy and simply did not have time to do any thing on blog.

The excursion  took place in Paanajärvi National park area in from 23rd of September - 3rd of October. But for me the excursion as started already from beginning of August because I have volunteered to take part in the Planning Group.

IWG has several small and large trips included in the course as part of skill training. The small ones are duration of about few day and large ones are about week to two. As usual, the large trips takes more planning, so the course members are assigned to at least one trip to form a Planning group.

Food planning sheet

The Russian trip was the one of the biggest excursion we have and is not in Finland, There was stressful mount of planning needed to be done.

Briefly what included in the planning:
Destination study
Correcting materials (Maps, contact information, background of destination...)
Risk assessment
Document arrangements (Permissions and visa)
Rout planing
Time table of trip
Daily time table
Guide assignment (will talk about this later...)
Gear planning
Food planning
 and so on and on and on....



The point is to practice the situation of as if I would have business of organizing the trip like this. Try to plan everything so that the trip goes smooth and fun.

On the planning process, One tool I found very use full was "how to plan the food". Planing of food has been a little bit of problem for me for quite some time. I use to plan it by experience and what would be nice to eat and carry, means pick up the things whatever way I feel like.
It is OK that way, if the trip is few days and I am alone. But it gets problematic when taking longer trip or need to plan food for several stomachs.
The tool is simple as to calculate how much calories would I need in a day when trekking. Then come up with then menu that fills the need. But there is a problem on actually doing this, which is also need to take in account the weight of food, nutritious value and balance. so, I came up with a excel sheet which automatically calculate those. With this, all I need to do is input the serving wight, Cal/100g and nutritious value. Once all data are in, just juggle around to come up with menu to get daily menu plan, the excel sheet will automatically generate the shopping list and approximate packing weight :)

All food I have took for the trip. each item is laveled 

As a result, I have got very satisfactory food plan for this excursion.  Every day, I have had just enough food which is not board me and kept my energy level well. Also it helped rationing the  food well that I had exact mount of food consumed as planed and not needed to carry anything back home, except the emergency food part.







Even thaw, I say it was satisfactory, there are few items I would like to add to next rip.
- butter
- ginger or some kind of flavoring
- salty snacks (i.e. beef jerky)
- more rice in the menu
- more self made dry food. (I had self made dried pork and rice this time.)

Here is the list of food I have planed for this trip. Some items, I swap it with alternative on the last minute because of availability or weight issue, but more or less the list is what I took with me.

Total (g)	Shopping list
720	Elovena Pikapuuro 2 boxes
180	AXA Glorious premium musli 1 pack
735	Butter cracker 98 pieces
800	Fazer Hazelnuts chocolate  4 packs
880	Rainbow Pähkinäcocktail 5 packs
696	Expedition meal Thai Chicken with rice 6 packs
336	Lammin kuppi Tomatti-basilika 12 packes or  4 box
200	Makaroni 200g
350	Fresh Pork ulko file 1050g
300	900 g of cooked rice
446	Expedition meal Pasta Mediterranean 4 packs
336	Lammin kuppi Kantarelli 16 packes or  5 box
632	Blå band Carbonara 4 packs