Gettin’ Closer

“Hurry up,” I tell my wrist, “You’ve got five days to heal.”

Last week I got up early to work out.  I got my weights out and set them by the door.  Half-asleep, I skipped around the room to warm up, and immediately tripped over the weights I’d just placed there.  BAM!  On my face.  I went down hard, graceless and shocked.  That’s a quick way to wake up.  I fancy I’m going to climb Mt. Whitney but I can’t make it around my own living room.  Great.  The wrist is the only lasting pain, but it seems to get worse by the day, so I don’t know what that’s all about.  Time’s a tickin’, Mr. Wrist.  Pull it together.

We’ve ranked our friend Paula among the best seamstresses on the planet, and she doctored up our packs.  Now Aidan can attach his trekking umbrella to his pack so he’s hands-free, and my belt straps are no longer seventy-five feet long.  You are a ninja, Paula.  Thank you!

We set up a giant brown tarp in the garage to use as a staging area for all of our tiny pieces of expensive gear so we don’t lose anything.

Although it seems counter intuitive since we’re headed into the wild, we decided to bring a watch.  We want to get up at 6 every day so we can hike in the morning and in the evening while the temperature is a little cooler.  In the middle of the day we plan to find a good spot to park ourselves.  Knowing us, we’ll find plenty to keep us busy.

I have a very small Bluetooth keyboard to go with my cell phone so I can blog on my wordpress.com app, and we are bringing a solar charger to juice up our electronics.

A few complications with our SPOT locator caused us to cancel our tracking service, but we are still able to send a check-in message, a help message, or a 911 message.  The SPOT is a personal locator beacon which connects to satellite so we can let our peeps know we’re okay, and will call out Search and Rescue to come get us in the unlikely case of an emergency.  If you’re going into the wilderness, make sure you get a SPOT.  It’s not that expensive, and not that heavy considering the peace of mind it brings.  We plan to send a check-in message every evening when we get to camp.  We still haven’t figured out how to connect it properly to Facebook, but if we can pull it off, our GPS coordinates will post on Facebook whenever we send a check-in.

We changed a few key items.  Now we are each bringing a three liter water bladder instead of a two liter bladder, and we chose a lightweight 2L  bladder reserve so we can bring extra when we need it, particularly for Mt. Whitney.

I’m still hemming and hawing over bringing down booties to sleep in.  They’re only 5 ounces, but that’s 5 ounces more to lug around.  I do sleep really cold though….ug.

I feel like our packs are still too heavy, so we’re sorting some of that out today and then we’ll be ready to post our gear list.