Date: 2017-03-30
From: PA 325, Clarks Creek

To: PA 325, Clarks Creek
Miles today: 0.0

This is my first night trying out my new camping gear and my first night blogging from the trail. We 2017 Expedition members are having our last prep hike before we start out in Georgia on April 29. I left my car at Pine Grove Furnace State Park and car pooled with my friend Paul to the trailhead at PA 325, our starting point for tomorrow.  I'm not an experienced camper. Before this, my only camping was in our VW poptop camper. It had beds, a refrigerator, a small sink, and a stove with two burners. This is definitely different!  I agonized over what equipment to buy. Till now I've been using a borrowed tent and sleeping pad and sleeping bags I had from about 25 years ago. I didn't want to be one of the folks who prepare for the trail by buying a lot of gear and then quit after just a few days. So I waited till I'd hiked enough of the trail to feel confident that I could do it before buying anything.Tonight I pitched my tent for the first time. It went up fairly easily and seems securely up. It's a Tarptent Moment double-walled tent. The inside wall is a frame of mesh to keep bugs out. The temperature now is about 45 degrees, and it's raining. So far, so good inside.I picked a Thermarest Sol Lite sleeping pad. It's closed cell foam with a silver-colored reflective surface. It's supposed to reflect body heat back to the camper's body and is very lightweight. When I sat on it to work on getting my sleeping bag zipped up I could definitely feel warmth. Again, so far, so good.Everyone advised me to get a synthetic-fill sleeping bag. Synthetic bags insulate even when wet, whereas down bags don't.   But I wanted something really warm, something rated at 15 degrees, and I couldn't find any synthetic bag that warm.   (I know these ratings must be taken with a grain of salt, but even so. If they don't even claim to be that warm, then they probably aren't.)  Then I saw a survey at the Appalachian Trials website of what kinds of sleeping bags AT thru hikers used in 2016. About two-thirds of the hikers used down. About a third used natural down, and another third used down treated to make it more water-resistant. So I settled on a treated down bag from Sierra Designs. I call it my purple sleeping bag named Eleanor. I'm sitting in it now and am quite warm.My other new equipment to try out is a bluetooth keyboard. My husband bought it for me years ago to use with my iPad, but I never created documents with the iPad and so never used it. I thought it would be way easier to have a real keyboard for writing my trail journal. And it is. It's a real luxury. Now I need to make a padded waterproof case to keep it in.Last weekend I tried out my new hiking boots. The right boot rubbed the left side of my ankle and hurt. This week I took the shoe to a running shoe shop. They looked at it and said the gusset on the left side of the tongue was sticking inside the shoe at an odd angle. They suggested pulling the material to the outside and stitching it in place there. I did that and walked around in it for a few hours. It seems to be fixed. I'm going to try it on tomorrow's hike, which is 18.9 miles. I may stick a spare pair of shoes into my pack, just in case. Tomorrow will be a more substantive day, but I expect to be too tired to write much.