Date: 2008-03-25
To: PREP #17
Miles today: 0.0

It¢s 4am. I couldn¢t sleep. It¢s hard to believe that two weeks from right now will be my 3rd night on the trail. I¢m not sure if I was dreaming about it before I woke up, but once I was awake, my mind started racing uncontrollably about the hike and everything I need to get done between now and then.It was really weird. I was awake, but ¢dreaming¢ about my journal entries from the trail. It¢s like I was writing my journal entries in my mind and reliving the experiences that I was writing about two weeks before they happen. It will be interesting to see if I have any ¢d©j vu¢ when I¢m on the trail from the things I imagined tonight. One of a few thru-hikers¢ journals I¢ve been reading regularly for the last month or so is Skittles and I really enjoy the ¢Skit¢s Bits¢ that he finishes each journal entry with. One of my journal entries from the trail that I imagined tonight was ¢Number of times I thought about work today: zero.¢ That really gave me a warm feeling inside.I attended an organizational meeting last night for the new Cincinnati Area Backpacker¢s Meetup group (http://backpackers.meetup.com/160/). It was an impressive turnout of probably 50 or so excited backpacking enthusiasts. It was also neat that there was a great diversity of experience ¢ from beginners to past thru-hikers. I think the meeting was the first time that I really introduced myself to anyone using my trailname, Bourbon. It was interesting to me how normal and comfortable it felt, especially considering I was standing in Borders book store in Tri-County wearing a custom tailored suit and dress shirt with French cuffs (I went straight from work). This past weekend, my wife created a Honey-Do list for me of things that she would like me to get done before I leave next Friday. I was surprised how short it was. The list of things that I want to get done that I¢ve been maintaining in my head is literally about five times longer and already included everything that she had on hers. The next week and a half will probably be pretty stressful trying to get everything marked off of that list. The one thing that I¢m 100% prepared for is the hike. My backpack is fully loaded and sitting neatly for me in a corner ready to go into the car next Friday afternoon for the drive to Georgia. I did stop at Benchmark Outfitters this afternoon to pick up some Aquamira for backup water purification. There may be a couple of other minor things that I might think of but I¢m pretty confident that I¢m ready to go. I want to thank my friend SuperDave VanFossen (AT06) for coming over for a beer while he was in town a couple of weeks ago to help me go through my pack and offer advice about my gear and my hike. My hundreds of hours of research over the last year through half a dozen AT books, tons of time on whiteblaze.net, and reading probably thousands of Trail Journal entries must have paid off because he didn¢t have too much advice for me gear-wise. One thing that I hadn¢t thought about was the back-up water purification so I¢m definitely glad he caught that. Another recommendation that was really good was to line my pack with a heavy duty contractor¢s plastic garbage bag and put my gear inside that to keep everything completely dry. Another thing which I¢ve heard him say a couple of times before and I¢m glad that I heard it from him because I¢ve read frustration in many current thru-hikers journal entries about rain and rain gear. SuperDave¢s advice was that I should understand that ¢rain gear is not to keep you dry, it¢s only to keep you warm.¢ We talked for probably four hours and I really enjoyed his stories from the trail and getting to see him again after such a long time. SuperDave flip-flopped in 2006 starting at Harper¢s Ferry north to Katahdin and then back to Springer and finishing at Harper¢s Ferry right before Christmas. Here is his 2007 Colorado Trail Journal - http://www.trailjournals.com/entry.cfm?trailname=6107