It’s not just a play on a classic song – dreams of the AT have started to infiltrate my dreams. I have dreamed of heavy packs, many waterfalls, tents, gear, and fellow hikers.
We had several weeks of sub-zero weather here in the Chicagoland area and more than 3 feet of snow in 3 weeks. It was a long slog through the month of February. But now March is on the immediate horizon and with it brings 1 year until we leave for the trail!
Our future thru-hike consumes many of the conversations between Matthew & I. The girls mostly roll their eyes or huff when we talk about it. When I mention that we bought something or planned something “for the trail” Charlotte will say, “I KNEW you were going to say, ‘for the trail’!”
Last month I wrote about a countdown that I had created on my Google calendar. Well, it’s already ‘off’ by a few weeks. Since writing that post, we received a 2021-2022 calendar from the school district and…Spring Break is a week later than I thought it would be! Oops. Spring Break goes into the first few days of April in 2022 and that’s just too late for us to start if we want to be back for the girls to start the new school year. So we are pushing up our start date by more than 2 weeks!
Already learning all about flexibility in planning.
We’ve been slowly buying some gear – mostly puffy jackets and one lightweight fleece hat from Good Will. But, that’s something, right?
I also had to help Matthew create a budget for the purposes of the grant application he is writing for his sabbatical proposal. I spent about 5 hours reading about the gear lists of other hikers, looking at websites, and making snap-decisions about what gear we might want.
(If you remember, my last post was about the overwhelming prospect of planning gear for our hike. Well, I guess a deadline for the creation of a budget solved my fears.)
Of course we can buy whatever we want when the time comes to pull out the credit card, but at least we have a rough estimate of what we might need.
I budgeted $1,000 for Advil alone. Ahhhh, that good ‘ol Vitamin I. It got us through many miles on the Camino.
We also decided to show the girls the National Geographic documentary about the Appalachian Trail. Charlotte wanted to see more ‘trail magic’ and ‘trail angels’. Amelia was un-amused. Then we made the (interesting) parenting decision to watch A Walk in the Woods. It was the girls first Rated R movie.
