Date: 2006-02-23
From: Blairsville, Ga

To: Blairsville, Ga
Miles today: 0.0

Time for another update....even though my house is a mess right now, I'm making progress with the things that needed to be done. The biggie is that I mailed my tax papers off to my CPA today. I guess I'll have him send them to me somewhere along the trail. I've always had my taxes done before I started walking, so this is a new twist. Hope it works out OK. My tent was really showing signs of age, so I had set it up the other day and sprayed it with a silicone sealer. LWOP did that to his and said it worked great. I'm not sure anymore how many nights I've slept in that tent, but it's got to be over 800 by now. Not bad for a $300.00 home. :-)))I've worn out 5 zippers on it too. I've never used a ground cloth and the bottom still looks like new except for a few small holes from little, sharp things that I missed when I set it up. I've even got a hole in the bottom from early on in the Florida walk I did when I set up at night on some fire ants....the little buggers ate right through my tent floor. I pulled out my old maps of the AT and went through what was left of them. They'll go into my bounce box waiting on their turn to be used again.It felt good to put my water pump into storage again. I needed it for the surface water on the Florida Trail, but I don't use it on the AT. I love all that fresh mountain spring water I get there. I'm making another change this year. I've always used Wingfoot's guide book and found it to be very good, but the Thru-Hiker's Companion has been reformatted this year to be much more hiker friendly and I've decided to give it a try. It now has the continuing mileages from either Katahdin or Springer. I never understood why the old books had mileage starting from the middle of the AT. That just made no sense to me at all and it didn't tell me where I was in relation to the start or the end of the AT. Now all the information is in that one book instead of two like it used to be and it can be easily taken apart and bounced along with my other stuff. I'm also making sure my summer quilt is in my bounce box this year. I walked right through the summer last year carrying a 10 degree sleeping bag. It worked out OK because I mostly just slept on top of it, but it weighs almost 1 1/2 pounds more than my quilt. The biggest change I'm making is inside my bounce box. I'm actually going to bounce my laptop along so I can upload photos every few hundred miles. That's not the only reason for taking the laptop, but it should work well for me to keep my photos posted. Computers aren't too hard to come by along the trail towns, but this way I'll be able to get a motel room and just vegetate for a day while I'm playing with my laptop. :-))) I bought a shipping box made especially for laptops, so I'll see how that works. I'll just make sure I insure the bounce box each time I send it farther up the trail. I guess my only other new piece of gear besides the 2 new pairs of Asics Trail Runners I bought for this walk is my new watch. Campmor had a sale on altimeter watches that I just couldn't pass up. It also has a night light....something my old watch didn't have. I always had to turn on my headlamp to see what time it was at night. All the rest of my stuff is pretty much the same ol' stuff I carry all the time.I did stop by the grocery store tonight and picked up a new bag of Starbuck's coffee and some fruit pies. :-))) Looks like all I have left to do is clean up my mess around here and add a few more pounds to my body weight.......tough life!! :-))) Can't wait until March 1st!!!!