Date: 2008-10-18
To: Drop and Bounce Boxes
Miles today: 0.0

Okay, it¢s time to sit down and do a gear review. I¢ve been doing this in my head for days, so many thoughts about so many things¢¦ how to narrow it down to just what others would want to know. I remember last year at this time I was pouring over Trail Journals making decisions about what I would buy for the trip. So I¢ll try to be helpful and not bore you with too many details. Truth is most gear is a personalized thing. But¢¦ here¢s my take¢¦Let¢s start with Drop Boxes. Not really gear, but an important part of the plan. I¢m not sure if I were doing another thru hike that I would use drop boxes at all. However, I do think they were useful in the first couple of months until we got a grasp on how the hike worked. My first big mistake with the drop boxes was shampoo. I thought I had found this great thing¢¦ powdered shampoo. I divided it up into small packs and split it up into all the drop boxes. That way I could have shampoo with me throughout the hike without having the risk of carrying a liquid that could make a mess. Unfortunately this shampoo smelled very strong¢¦ VERY strong. Anything in the box near it absorbed the smell of the shampoo. We lost a lot of food that way before we realized what was happening and had Greg go through the future boxes and remove all the shampoo. By then tho we were a little shampoo phobic. Owl and I would make up a meal and sit a stare at each other, neither wanting to be the one to test and see if it tasted like shampoo. Turns out that every hiker hostel we stayed at all up and down the trail provided shampoo and soap for the hikers. Cheap hotels were the only place that didn¢t, but it was easy enough to find sample sizes at RiteAid or CVS, which were also all up and down the trail. Skip the shampoo. Owl and I found that a packet of wipes was good for cleaning up at the end of the day on the trail and would do between town visits for a shower. We soon realized our food plan wasn¢t so great either. We planned our meals as a group. I made half the meals and Tigger made half. We found that our tastes as we hiked were so different, we didn¢t want to eat the same things. It was pretty early in the hike when we decided to split up our meal preparations and Owl and I did our own. I also would change the way I had planned meals. I prepared multiples of a few dishes. My thinking was if I make ten batches of spaghetti to stretch over six months, we would be eating spaghetti less than once every two weeks. That sounds okay. I can¢t tell you how sick we got of that spaghetti dish! I still like the idea of cooking ahead, but I would not do more than one batch of each dish. And I¢m not sure I would do it for more than the first half of the hike. After that we had figured out what we could buy in town that worked well on the trail.   There are a lot of good meal options in small trail town groceries. I was expecting only to find ramen noodles, but that wasn¢t the case. There are lots of flavored pasta dishes, potatoes, and meats that I hadn¢t realized before we started. I still like my Backpack Gourmet cookbook, but I think I¢ll save it for section hikes from now on. There was one thing we had in our drop boxes that I was just as happy to get at the end of the hike as I was at the beginning. The laundry bag. I put two WashEZE laundry sheets in a ziplock along with a couple bounce sheets and a small bag of baking soda. In the early boxes I also threw in some quarters. Yes, you can buy soap and get quarters at small town Laundromats, but it was so convenient to just open the drop box, grab the laundry bag, head to the laundromat and dump it all in. It was just one thing made a little easier. Most of the things I had in our drop boxes we could easily have streamlined into our bounce boxes instead. So if I had to do it over again I would mail much less, if anything to myself in drop boxes.   The bounce box on the other hand was very helpful. In it we had cords for charging our cell phones and camera and extra cell phone batteries, tho at the end we carried these with us. We also had some clothes. Most of the hike we kept a town outfit to change into while doing laundry. When we went north we also had our cold weather gear in our box until we got a feel for the weather. Because we were homeschooling on the trail we also had some pamphlets for Owl to identify flowers and animals on the trail.   There was always a book or two that she planned to read next. Very often we would bounce forward some food. If we wanted to buy something like instant breakfast or oatmeal and couldn¢t buy in it small portions we would mail forward the extras for the next leg of the trip. Enough of that, on to the next¢¦.