We are ready to hike.

Ready to be done planning.

Ready to be done moving.

Ready to clear our minds and just walk.

It takes a lot of effort, time, patience, deep breaths, dedication and planning to leave the city life – even if only temporarily.

“The struggles will be worth it.” That’s what I keep telling myself. It’ll all be worth it when we’re finally out there walking.
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This post will get you caught up with where we are at this point (more or less), with less than a week til we start hiking!!

Leaving Our Lives In San Francisco Behind

The carpet – vacuumed ✔

The closet – empty ✔

The bed – missing sheets, pillows and a comforter.

And the walls – naked, ready to host another person’s memories and ambitions.

I have left my apartment. I am officially homeless. On purpose!

And Laurie will join me as we embark on the dirtbag life April 2nd when she leaves her apartment.

Resupply Boxes

We will be sending ourselves nearly 60(!!) resupply boxes along the way. And putting these boxes together has been one of the most time consuming, tedious and daunting tasks I have ever undertaken.

Why?

Since we are sending ourselves almost all our food, it makes sense to include most of the items we will need to hike the next section too – including toiletries, maps, information about the next town, other vital information, vitamins, water purification and many, many more things.

Having all these items will allow us to actually rest when we roll into town, and eat(!!!), or head back onto the trail sooner since we will spend less time running around in towns looking for supplies.

At the same time, we’ve had to figure out where to ship these boxes. We called many of the places (listed in guidebooks and websites) we will be shipping our boxes to ensure they still accept them and how they prefer said boxes be mailed (USPS Priority Mail or UPS/FedEx) to ensure delivery.

Our efforts will hopefully translate to our packages arriving at their destinations and into our packs without issue.

Food, Food, Food

By a country mile, the most arduous component of the resupply boxes has been piecing together our food.

Who knows what we’ll want to eat a few days from now let alone a few months from now?

Many hikers who’ve come before us warn would-be hikers to not plan all their food because taste buds change and many people get sick of their food.

Anticipating this, we have been focusing A LOT on variety.

Sweet, salty, savory, meaty, even sour – you name it, we’re gonna be eating it! Pasta sauce ‘fruit’ leather anyone?

If we haven’t mentioned this yet, the reason we are sending ourselves most of our food is because I care greatly about the quality of the foods I eat and Laurie is gluten intolerant. In short, we anticipate options will be very limited in small towns.

We’ll let you know how it goes. Stay tuned…

Below are a few pictures in which I tried to capture the enormity of the food we have amassed the last few months, and the boxes we have to squeeze them into.

It’ll all be worth it!

It’ll all be worth it!