Date: 2008-03-12
To: Final count down to the trail
Miles today: 0.0

Final count down to the trail. I'm now commited to leaving on March 27th from Berlin, NH to Tampa, FL as I have bought a non-refundable discount airplane ticket. Tampa will be the first stop on the trip so that I can spend a few days with my folks. Then they will drive me up to Amicalola Falls to see me off. Will likely be on the trail on or about April 1st. A good day to start, fool that I am.The usual last minute activities are going on around here. Paying off bills, finishing up projects which need finishing up and all that. Leaving town for 2 months does take some preperation and planning! Can't just turn the lights off and walk away, assuming everything will be just fine when you get back. My pack weight is slowly creeping up to the 20 pound limit (less food and water, as those are variable loads) I've imposed on myself. I would rather it be 15 pounds, but we can't count on the weather being kind to us yet. Not in the hills of North Carolina during April, dispite global warming. I'll be shipping my pack down to my folks house in Florida so I don't have to fly with it. Really don't want to risk those TSA guys pulling the pack apart and then forgetting to put everything back in. Nor do I want to risk 600 or more bucks worth of gear being the 1% of luggage lost by airlines. I'm flying JetBlue and they can bearly afford jet fuel. So, I need to have everything I want ready in about a week from now. I've ordered a Penny Whistle and hope to learn how to play a few ditties on it along the way. Most likely it will clear an area a mile around of both man and beast when I attempt to play it :-) If you hear some strange screeching noises in the woods, it will likely be me and my penny whistle. Maybe I can rip the instructional CD which comes with it onto my MP3 player. Maybe that will help, maybe not. Another addition to the pack is a small fry pan. I have been looking for something suitable and finally found one at Wal-Mart the other day. It's called a "one egg" pan as it claims to be ideal for cooking one egg. Even has non stick coating. I modified it to be even more pack freindly by removing the handle and cutting its heigth down by 1/2", which was not easy to do with just a hack saw - you try making a clean cut at a constant height around a 4.5" dia circle in 1/4" thick aluminum while trying to hold onto the no-stick coating they put on the outside of the pan! (A feature so claims the sticker on the pan - non-stick coating on both the inside and outside!)After these modifications, I got the pan's weight is down to 2.3 oz, half of what it was when I started. Of course, now I had to add a pot grabber thingie to the cook set and had to make a special alcohol stove to use with the fry pan. A normal alcohol stove has too much flame for too short a time to make a stack of pancakes. After a number of experiments, I came up with a stove design which produces a fairly modest and even flame for a long time on a small amount of fuel. I also had to make a little wood spatula so I can flip pancakes. Oh to be able to make pancakes and spam cheese burgers on the trail! What a delight that will be and the envy of other hikers! My MSR titanium pot sits reasonably snuggly into whats left of the lip around the pan and all the accessories fit inside the pot - a plastic drinking cup, two stoves, wind screen/pan support, pot grabber, spatula and cleaning pad. My custom made stuff sack for the pot had enough slack to accept the added heigth of the fry pan. That was a relief, as I really didn't want to have to sew up another sack too. I was able to figure out a way to attach a small solar charger to the top of my pack. The charger is just a little bigger than an Altoids tin. It charges an internal battery which is then in turn used to charge other devices, such as my PDA. By glueing a couple of Bic pen barrels on to the bottom of the charger box, I can run some elastic cord through the tubes and attach the cord to the loops at the edges of the pack's top pocket. Time will tell if this solar charger gizzmo is worth lugging around or not. I suspect not, but we'll find out for sure soon enough. One thing the solar charger lacks is an indication of the battery's state of charge. I need to remeber to build a little thingie to do this job before the week is out. One last thing I decided to add to the load is a box of birthday candles. Figure these will help start fires which are being stuburn to get going. Not that I bother making camp fires very often, but they can be nice once in a while when you have time and energy to kill. Well, thats about it for now. Next entry will likely be from the trail. In the mean time, I will keep doing little 2 mile walks everyday its not snowing, raining or way too cold and windy out. Need to get my legs and feet in shape for some serious abuse. My left knee which gave me some trouble after snow shoeing just before Christmas seems to be back to normal. Still smarts a little when I twist on it wrong, but not too bad. As much as I wanted to go out and play in all this snow we've gotten this winter, was afraid I might injure the knee again so didn't. Gonna carry a knee support just in case at the start of the trip and hope I don't need it so can send it home. I would really like to do a 1000 miles on this trip and do it in not much more than 60 days. If I can't, will just have to try again next year! Happy Tramping