Saturday, June 16, 2012

"To be prepared...

...is half the victory."

-Miguel de Cervantes (author of Don Quixote).

It took longer to prepare to hike the Appalachian Trail than to actually hike it.

My best step in preparation was to join a listserve (remember those?) of veteran AT hikers or those preparing to hike like me.

I slowly created this list of items I planned on taking:


With eagerness, I researched and price-compared and waited for sales (loved CampMor and Sierra Trading Post!)

Arriving within days of each other, my one-man tent, sleeping bag, and headlamp all came.  I set up the tent in my bedroom and slept in it and the sleeping bag while wearing my headlamp!

I also started to plan out food.  The Trail goes through some towns with decent grocery stores, and other towns, well, your best bet is to have a box of food shipped to the post office.  After a long visit to Sam's Club, I packed up a whole bunch of food boxes and left them with my parents, and a list similar to this:



The die was cast (at least, a few hundred dollars had been spent).

The school year ended early June, and it was time.

I drove to my parent's house in Tennessee (at the time) to leave my car and went to bed planning on boarding a Greyhound bus to Maine early the next morning...





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