The Great Canadian Beavers -- Mongol Rally 2010

Fear not, we are still alive!

2010-06-01T06:28:00.000-07:00

After a brief hiatus (with three weeks travelling Turkey and Jordan for Andrea and a mysterious week-long "vacation"/disappearance by Nick), The Great Canadian Beavers are all back in Canada and ready to go!

We are EXTREMELY pleased to announce we have procured a car for ourselves! A spiffy little 1.2 litre Vauxhall Agila in an aptly coloured red, which the UK seller has kindly agreed to hold on to until our arrival in London. When I get my hands on some photos I'll be sure to post them! a million thank you's to Dancy for stepping up and sorting this out for us.

A sponsorship package is also almost complete. I know we're a little late in the game for this one, but I suppose it's better late than never? I have to give out an extremely big THANK YOU to Drucey, of The Islanders, who has been an IMMENSE help so far, and even sent me his template and information from his own team's very successful sponsorship campaign.

Things finally feel like they're coming together, and I couldn't be more pleased! Visa applications will be sent out at the end of this week, and I am crossing all my cross-ables that it goes off without a hitch!

CUPCAKES!

2010-04-30T19:40:00.001-07:00

So this past tuesday, with the help of my phenomenal mother and her best friend (and Emily's mother) Melanie, a successful bakesale was carried out at my old elementary school, St. Michaels.

A massive (and grueling) 450 (or so) cupcakes were made, and an awesome $210.05 was made for Mercy Corps Mongolia! (I'm not too sure where that $0.05 came from...I think I may have let a couple kids get away with not paying the full $0.50. woops!)

A HUGE and sincere thank you to my mom and Melanie, I could not have done it without you two! even IF my cupcakes were made from scratch....;)

See photos below!

The decorating table.

Andrea and Dancy's crazy mother.

Emily's equally crazy mother.

table of cupcakes ready for decorating.

SPRINKLES! my favourite part.

Delicious!

Chocolate with maple topping.

Close up.

Prepping the cupcake trays.

Decorating.

Donations! donations! donations!

2010-04-20T13:17:00.000-07:00

Another big thank you to Kate Ann Follwell and John Geen and Elinor Campbell (whose donation I have not put through yet). You guys are doing an amazing job helping us, help others!

As an aside, I have tweaked our photo gallery on the website. Now it's an actual gallery, not just a link to our Flickr page. Feel free to browse the photos, leave comments etc.!

Mase.

Donations.

2010-04-19T13:39:00.001-07:00

Big thanks to Brend Wasserman and Jennifer Leigh Saunders for your donations :) Love you both, you girls are awesome!

*Mase.

99 days!

2010-04-15T04:44:00.000-07:00

Just under a hundred days to go. 99 to be exact!

Team Photos

2010-04-13T13:05:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time coming, (mostly because, in the face of all the other preparations I forgot), but below are some team photos we took a couple months ago. Enjoy!

(you can click to enlarge them a bit individually)

Our team. In our non-existant car.

Captain Planet?

Perhaps a photo theme for future rally photos in remote locations?

Who needs a car when you have Nick.

Progress report.

2010-04-13T10:42:00.001-07:00

So where exactly are we in terms of preparation for this epic journey from London, England to Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia you ask?

Good question.

1. Visa's have been arranged, though not officially applied for. (That will come in May and we are assured we won't have TOO difficult a time organizing it). At least, for those team members that have their official documentation prepared.

2. Still no car as of yet. We ARE looking at some prospective models but it relies entirely on what our final team count turns out to be (which should be decided this week). Once this is sorted we will immediately begin the search for OUR CAR!

3. Our official sponsors are currently The Quinte Sports Review and PartSource in Belleville, Ontario. I have also been agonizing over potential sponsorship packages to send to companies and, while it's been time consuming I believe the time is drawing near for me to send out as many letters as I physically can in hopes of even a few of them trickling back to me in the form of funds and aid.

4. In terms of funds raised, we have a total of $475 in online donations and about $1,000 (maybe a little more) in donations from the WONDERFUL patients of Dr. Mason at The Urgent Care Medical Clinic. A big thank you goes out to Kate-Ann Follwell, Bruce Diamon, Joan Young, David Dancy, Margaret Mason, Don Raycroft, Dave Elmy of the Quinte Sports Review, Kristin Scowcroft, Walmshields ltd. Mark Walmsley, Brian Dawson, Bob Jamieson, Clara and Marilyn Walker, The Scharf sisters and the Universty of Ottawa Alumni Association for their generous donations so far - (More names soon to come! I just don't have them all in front of me). I cannot stress enough how much these donations, regardless of how big or small, have helped this rally to come to fruition.

5. Lastly, as I mentioned in an earlier post, our charitable donation procedure has changed. We had issues with canadahelps.org and ultimately ended up having to switch online donations to justgiving.org, a UK based online donation facilitator. While we are excited to work closely with justgiving.org, and Mercy Corps Mongolia, it means that at this point in time we are unable to generate Canadian Tax receipts (because it is a UK based company/charity branch). We are of course concerned with the potential this has for deterring donations and sponsorship, but have no choice but to press on. If you are interested in making a donation you can go to our JustGiving page here. We appreciate any and all help!

I think that's it for now...

2010-01-13T12:40:00.000-08:00

Hollaaaaa

Emily C here. This post comes as a result of committing myself to staying at school all afternoon to get some work done, since I am so good at remaining unproductive while at home. Clearly though, I am equally proficient at avoiding schoolwork while at school. Who knew?

For me, life happens while I'm avoiding other stuff.

I spent a good chunk of the last few hours fantasizing about the Mongol Rally... mostly images of wide open spaces with no pedagogical scholars in sight (that's people who study education, a noble but confusing pursuit).

I am in my first and only year of teachers' college and am waiting with bated breath for Real Life to start. This semester I am balancing preparation for the rally, trying to remain gainfully employed in order to stay in said rally, finding a real post-rally job and doing no more than the required work to get my degree. Wow, I'm awesome.

All the results of our team photo shoot last November are finally up and maaan... we ARE a good lookin' bunch. Based on those photos who could even resist the request to sponsor us.

I suppose in the next little while we will be organizing visas, learning Russian and purchasing plane tickets. How exciting!

Aaanyways, I'm out for now, thanks for the opportunity to ramble about myself!

2010-01-04T22:03:00.000-08:00

Well imagine that, a new year.

I'd like to say something pithy and elegant, but I've just gotten off the job and am about to put on some headphones to listen to music for a couple hours and then sleep (it's a charmed life) -- so basically, I'm on auto-pilot at the moment. Still, I thought our wide-ranging audience needed to hear from their chum Dancy, since it's been so long.

Right now, with the turning of 2010, things are going to be gearing up (literally haha get it??! god I hate puns). But seriously, we've got some business to take care of. The charities are still up in the air but the day on which we purchase our CAR - the keystone of it all -- is fast approaching. No rally, no car right? Will it be an ambulance? A soccer-mom van? A tractor (much favoured by myself, as numerous Facebook photos prove, if you can dig them up.) Only time will tell.

And let's not even talk about visas.

So, the next few months are going to be the quiet before the storm, if the storm has not already hit us. I have more and more dreams of Moscow, and fears of severed hands in Kazakhstan, maybe I should blog about that next time.

- Dancy

2009-12-27T09:27:00.000-08:00

I forgot to add this to our previous entry, but we took some team photos! I'm having difficulty receiving all the photos that we took, but here are three of them. When the full shoot becomes available I'll upload those as well.

You can also see an article that featured our team in the local Belleville paper, The Intelligencer here

2009-12-27T08:52:00.001-08:00

It's funny, nowadays whenever I find myself driving for long distances I'm almost always daydreaming that I am speeding down the autobahn in Germany, or on my way to the Czechout party in Prague. I haven't even participated in the rally and yet it's already changed the way I think in my day to day life. Only 209 days to go and I'm not entirely sure I can stand to wait that long.

Not all news is good news however, and tragedy has struck in the department of charitable donations. We WERE donating to Mercy Corps Canada through Canadahelps.org but it turns out that the Canadian branch of Mercy Corps has voluntarily revoked their charitable status and the $475 we have currently raised must be re-distributed to a Canadian charity that our current donors approve of. The problem? I do not think the Mongol Rally's other charity options have Canadian branches (and even if they did the charity itself would need to approve of being affiliated with the Rally) and where we choose to have the money re-donated to MUST be Canadian, so our fund raising efforts up to this point may be for naught. The Great Canadian Beavers are currently in touch with Canadahelps.org, Mercy Corps and The Adventurists in hopes of resolving this rather major kink in our efforts. Worst case scenario I think we're hoping the money we've raised so far can be re-distributed to another charity even if it's not affiliated with the Mongol Rally, and that our fund raising efforts from that point on will be for another official charity. I am told the Adventurists are currently enjoying Mince pies until January fourth however, and must therefore be patient in awaiting a response.

I suppose this all boils down to good practice; after all, it wouldn't be an adventure if everything went smoothly in the days leading up to the crazy Rally now would it?

2009-12-20T19:33:00.000-08:00

Well, Christmas is approaching (and a white one at that!) and Rally preparations seem to have been put on a bit of a haitus. Dancy has almost completed training at her new job, and I've been slaving away at my online courses (to be completed by January 4th - FINALLY!) and working two jobs, so life has been, to say the least, a little bit hectic.

First and foremost, I would like to give a BIG thank-you to Dave Elmy, who has been wonderful in featuring our team in his local Belleville newspaper, the Quinte Sports Review AND securing us our very first corporate sponsor - PartSource!

You can see the preliminary article (Dave will be doing a number of them detailing our journey) at www.qsr.ca. You'll need to download the PDF and the article is on the second page.

Hopefully just the first of many more to come!

that's about all that's going on in the Beavosphere for the moment. Hopefully next time I'll have more to say - maybe even some team photos?

2009-11-20T06:36:00.000-08:00

The cold, damp, dark winters have already begun creeping up on us here in Canadialand (well, for me at least, perhaps for Dancy as well) and I must confess, I find myself dreaming more and more about the vast and warm expanses of the Kazakhstan desert that we'll be sure to encounter on our trek across (parts) of the world.

Some days this trip cannot come fast enough and, at other times, the daunting weight of everything that needs to be accomplished in the next eight months seems almost impossible to surmount. We have no car, a rather haphazardly planned route and only tentative sketches of sponsorship at best - BUT today we have managed to secure our very first charitable donation! (At least, the first officially recorded one through our canadahelps donation page, which, (shameless plug!) can be accessed here).

My lovely godfather has been generous enough to donate $100.00 towards our cause and, let me tell you, I couldn't be happier! That little $0 marker was making me rather depressed in recent days.

I was also beginning to worry that the donation function of our page was, well...broken. but all hope is not lost and I can once again regain my faith in both humanity and technology! though that is beside the point.

Speaking of technological advances, Dancy and I have both uploaded rather silly youtube vidoes, here and here which, I think I speak for both of us when I say, we would love for you to check out! You may learn something you never knew about us...unlikely, but still.

As always, please pass the word on to friends & family, any and all support helps - even if it's just word of mouth.

New Blog

2009-11-11T12:52:00.000-08:00

Well, here we are again!

We'll try to figure out how to backload our previous posts, but they were sort of...lame.

Lots of stuff is going on the the Canadian Beavo-sphere, namely a brand-spanking new website. So keep checking back with us!

May the force be with you.