Backpacking Is The Art of Knowing What Not To Take ~ We are still working on the mastery of that skill.

First I need to give a big thank you to Kristi for her patience in letting me make this time lapse video of our move and preparation for our hike. You have to understand the making of this video included taking over 2,000 pictures and there is nothing quite as challenging as being asked, wait don’t move that yet the camera isn’t ready.  She made it through it like a trooper though and never hit me hard enough to leave a bruise.  This video shows from day one of packing through this morning when we left with only our packs and smiles. 

In these last few days many lessons have been learned here in Austin, TX. I will try to run through a few of them and make sure that the names are changed as needed to protect the innocent.  Never mind, maybe I will mention a few names, but I won’t add any pictures.  Kristi’s brother Jon and girlfriend Sarah came in to town this weekend for a little impromptu goodbye party for us.  Well I can’t lie, the real reason that they came into town was see an Eddie Vedder concert, but that ended up being cancelled so we had to find other things to fill our time.  This is how I learned my first lesson which was that midwestern boys can be a bad influence on the likes of an innocent well mannered Southern boy.  I won’t go into any details, you will just have to trust me on that one.  

The second nugget of information that I  learned was that if you walk around downtown Austin for long enough, you never know who you will run into.  We were able to meet up with the likes of Boba Fett and Jimmy Sunshine, but those stories will not be chronicled here in order to protect all parties involved.  We made it through all of it and many of those events were probably way more dangerous than anything that we will encounter on the trail.  In all honesty, we are truly grateful that Jon and Sarah were both able to make it down, because Kristi and I were able to leave the obsessive planning world for a little while and go enjoy Austin and its 1 lb. donuts, which would not have been possible without their presence.

Kristi and I were also able to learn that you can in fact pack up an entire apartment in a 5 day period and pack for a 5 month journey in a 12 hour period.  While it can be and was accomplished, we first realized this was a challenge when neither of us could keep our eyes open any longer on Sunday night no matter how much Cell Food or Red Bull was ingested and we still had a lot of work to do.  This led to a good nights nap where we awoke promptly at 4 am.  I realized quickly that the mind does not function as well this early when I found myself locked out of our apartment complex at 4:30am 5 short hours before our flight.  Believe it or not, there is not a lot of traffic around an apartment building at that time even in Austin.   Luckily right before I resorted to a well thought out plan of throwing rocks at our 4th story window, I was able to convince a very nice police officer into helping me inside despite my grungy pre hiker look.  We were able to push through everything that we needed to be done in order pack the apartment, pack for our trip, and store Kristi’s car and we are now comfortably riding on our flight from Dallas to San Diego.  


I don’t think that either one of us have had a moment to think about everything that has happened in the last few weeks or the adventure that is awaiting, but I believe that this journey that we are about to embark on will give us the luxury of plenty of time to do just that, think.  Maybe I will be able to figure out Boba Fett was doing on 6th street.  If I do, I’ll let you know.