Date: 2007-03-22
To: Preparations
Miles today: 0.0

(Willie) Wow, the excitement and nervous jitters are out in full force! Two weeks from this very moment we¢ll be walking on the trail somewhere in Georgia. Two weeks form now the hectic life that includes work, volunteering at the fire house, hours and hours of planning, working out, trying to deny the fact that I¢m hopelessly addicted to reality TV, and so much more will have faded away. All that we¢ll be worrying about in two weeks is eating, sleeping, and walking. How crazy is that? You know, it just dawned on me that these are called prep entries and we haven¢t actually written anything about our preparations. I guess that now is as good of a time as any to do that.Once the decision was finally made on December 28th (thank goodness for 8 hour car rides back home from visiting my family for Christmas) to go through with this, it was time to start planning. We now had to cram what took me roughly two years to do for my last AT hike into just 3 short months. Add that to the fact that this time I wouldn¢t have the luxury of being unemployed and living at home while planning, I knew that we were in for a race against the clock to get a lot of stuff done in a very short amount of time. How in the world were we going to get this done? The only option was to work our tails off.In order to walk for 5 months you have to be in killer shape right? So obviously the first thing you should do is hit the gym right? Yeah, that would have been a great idea, but we resorted to another type of workout instead. Over the last few months we¢ve worked our credit cards to the bone! I really have no idea how they handled it. It would have been nice if we had made our decision before Christmas and birthdays passed by, but we missed out on that this time so we were on our own. For the big things we decided to buy mostly all new stuff, because lets be honest, even the best gear has a limited number of miles in it before it gives out. We did the best we could to shop around for deals because when you¢re planning on losing 5 months of paychecks money is always an issue. We¢re both REI members so dividends and coupons helped out there. I definitely won¢t complain about getting a $315 tent for $200, that¢s for sure. It helped that we were shopping while a lot of stores were having their winter clearance sales so if we were lucky enough to find a size that fit there was money to be saved there. We were also got a 20% discount on everything we bought at Hudson Trail Outfitters (one of the perks of our Sportrock climbing membership), which we took advantage of. But in the end it got to the point where we really couldn¢t wait much longer and we had to give in and pay full price for some things :-(. Somehow we managed to pull it off and we¢ve got just about everything we need gear wise. The last things that we¢re waiting on are my hiking poles, which should arrive in the next day or so. I would¢ve liked to have used my old poles, but I seem to have a knack for bending them or getting them stolen by bears, so all I had were a bunch of single poles lying around. I at least wanted to start the trip off matching, but if I bust another one, I¢m going with the mismatch approach, that¢s for sure! Now that shopping is done, we can finally start concentrating on everything else.