All rise..

D:
It is at this time that I would like to thank everyone involved in helping us assemble our adventure. We had a truck and trailer, two motorcycles and a 15 year old kitty to transplant before we could get started. We also needed someone to kick out food to us at the prescribed time with general mail delivery, and that would be quite a task. Not hard, but for six months?! Thank you

The Countdown Continues...

H:
Several months back when we chose our day of departure for the blogs countdown clock, I picked an arbitrary day thinking that I could go back and change the date when we were closer to leaving.   Unfortunately the counter cannot be changed!  While you may think that we are going to be putting sneaker to trail in less than a day, we're really not.  Probably..... another 7 days before we start hiking.

However, this is our last full day in the state of Indiana, providing all goes according to plan!  We are packing up today to get to my parents and arrange all of our resupply packages. 
But, before that we have to:

• Make phone calls to certain businesses.
• Do last minute sewing projects while a sewing machine is still accessible.
• Sort out an Amazon shipment.  I ordered bulk bullion to go in our soups (because I can only get 2 or 3 boxes at a time from the grocery store shelf) and they sent 1 box instead of 1 box of 12 smaller boxes, and part of the shipment appears to have been damaged and returned but it doesn't say that it is my bullion. 
• I still have to sort through my yarn to pick out what I want to knit on the trail.
• We have to figure out how to load the car for our 10 hour+ drive to Virginia.  We have a good bit of stuff to haul!
• Plan a route to my parents' in Virginia!!

And I'm sure there's even more than I can think of right now, but I'm not worrying about it until after I wake up a bit more and can make coherent decisions.

While we're working on getting ready to go, not everything we do has to do with the trail.

D:
Heather's cousin has had some wood just waiting for the right project. 4 hours later, was a Dave style work bench. Total cost, 20 dollars. Homemade work bench

Snack Attack

H:
Remember all those fruits we put through the dehydrator?  One of our projects on the "to do list" was to repackage the bulk amounts down to snack packs.

Divvying up our dried fruits like this will allow us to have some of those awesome treats throughout our whole trip.

Bananas, apples, pineapple, kiwi, dried banana puree, sweet potato puree, and pumpkin leather.

But we couldn't stop there.  Into each pack of fruit we tossed a variety of nuts and store bought honeyed snack mix, as well as chocolate and yogurt covered raisins.

I have to say that not everything made it to the snack packs.  I had help from various young-ins though out the process.  For their work they got to sample a little of everything.

We'll still need to buy snacks for the hike but it will be just augmenting all our hard work.  

Another one of our yummy mix packs is homemade granola.  Full of oats, shredded coconut, nuts, cranberries, raisins. and all of it coated with agave nectar, vegetable oil, and various flavorings.  

We packed a cup of this delicious mix into a baggie with 1/3 cup of powdered milk for an instant and calorie packed breakfast.  All we will need to do is add water and eat.

Training... the hard way.

People keep asking if we've done any training for our hike.  I think 2 weeks of carrying around a 45 pound toddler should work just fine if our goal is to have our packs weigh less than that!

I'm taking a healthy sum of micro sd cards on the trail

D:
Almost 200 gigs of music and audio book entertainment.
So they have a better chance of not getting lost and another chance to make something myself..
http://www.instructables.com/id/Food-Saver-microsd-holder/

Soup's on!

H:  

While we were house sitting last week we took advantage of a table, something we don't own.  That's right, we don't own a table in our RV and apparently I haven't told absolutely everyone that we live in an RV.  So if it's new to you, we've been living and travelling the country for the last 10 years in a 29 foot travel trailer.  But for this episode we had a table, so I will continue... 

When we began putting together soup packet options based on a pack of soup that I bought at the store and a rough idea of how many calories we wanted per pack (excluding perishables, like oil, that will be added when it is cooked on the trail).

We attempted to make our own version of the Corn and Potato Chowder by Canterbury Naturals, we added the following dried ingredients:

Tomatoes

Onions and chives

Corn

Shredded potatoes

And beans (of course!).

These weren't in the original pack but we've added beans to every pack that we made.  The image shows a can of beans 15oz (sans label) and next to it is its dehydrated equivalent 1.5oz.  Some have asked why we were dehydrating beans, they already come dried.  Dehydrated beans are able to be re-hydrated in hot water in 10 minutes versus dried beans which require soaking and prolonged cooking.  Also, if you're desperate you can eat the beans dehydrated.  I found myself doing this often when I was packaging them for storage.  They're quite like a chip when they're dehydrated.

To start, we calculated calories for the items we were putting in the soups.  Then we weighed out a single packs worth to figure out proportions and total caloric amounts in the pack.  Our soup packs are large enough to serve both of us, so they weigh between 8 to 12 ounces.  The variance in the pack weight is based on ingredients and "eh, that's good enough".  We tried to be scientific but we worked on this for 3 days and may have, at times, put extra vegetables in depending on how tired we were getting with the whole process. 

Below is our adaption of a another soup that I bought.  It was a boxed soup that was a really great combination, so we put it on our list for replicating:

Potato, Quinoa, and Spinach Soup: 

And, of course, beans for good measure!

This is a soup that we made and tested out while we were fixing packs.  I just added a little bullion that was at hand.

When we're on the trail, bullion cubes will be added to each pack to boost the flavor.  This is my preferred brand.  It comes in a few other flavors and will pack and travel well.  We contemplated putting these in before we sealed up packaging but I didn't have enough to fill them, so we'll just toss them in our food boxes that will be shipped to us.

Another common combination was whole wheat couscous, dried vegetables and... beans!

After a day and a half we had about half the pack figured out.  We got a lot faster as we went.  Eventually it became a game... "Hey Dave, pick a bean, any bean... okay black beans."  Then I'd figure out what else we had that would end up getting mixed in to flush out the packs.

We would dump sandwich sized Ziplock bags of different ingredients into a big bowl, stir to combine, measure out a bag's worth with the scale, figure out how much volume that was (1 cup, cup and a half, etc), then we'd start scooping to fill bags as fast as we could.

This is our Whatchagot Stew:

This particular mix came about by having small amounts of different soup packs left over.  They wouldn't be enough to fill one pack completely.  We'd set them aside and eventually we'd end up with a mixing bowl's worth that would be a hodge podge of everything.  It tasted pretty good with not really planning it out.  That made our pack making even faster.  We ended up with a fair number of this style.

2 servings plus half a pot's worth left over for 2 non-hungry hikers which means it will probably be be just right for when we're hiking.

Dave, lost in a sea of plastic bags and bean dust:

Below is a large mixing bowl of our Three Bean Chili mix:

Spices we added to each bag of the Three Bean Chili:

Another common meal:  Black Beans and Corn Soup

All said and done we have ended up with enough packs to last 6 months of hiking and a little extra for good measure.  Some of these we will use to test out our stove over the next couple of weeks.  More on that to come. 

D:
Been busy, that's the general theme, but it's coming together. There's obviously a lot to do in organizing your life to be in a holding pattern while you're hiking for 6 months.
1. We sorted all of the dried food over the last 5 months in to 350 to 450 calorie meals. The total was 234 meals, yes that's a lot of dehydrating, and each one of those meals feeds us both. So far that is over 1 meal per day for both of us, given 180 days on the trail. The idea is, that sometimes we'll eat in town, and not need 3 dehydrated meals each per day. We also have the option to dehydrate some more, before we leave. We could even put someone up to continue to do that for us while we're on the trail but Heather believes we have what needs to be dehydrated under control.

2. Ah, the art of inventing. I've been up to inventing one or two things in my time, and this invention is my own design cook stove. Saving money is always good, but making a stove out of a cat food can that weighs 10 times less and a cost of 30 times less than another model of hiking stove is a good benefit.
I simply peeled off the lid, fed the cat (makes sense) Put about a half dollar sized hole in the lid, turned the handle around 180 degrees to be able to place the lid back on the burner to lower the flame, called a simmer ring. Then I placed 30cc's of Heet, a gas line antifreeze in the base of the cat food can (Rubbing and denatured alcohol work too). Not only did it boil in about 8 minutes, it continued to burn for an additional 20 minutes with the simmer ring placed. That will be handy when we want to continue to cook longer after the water comes to a boil.

The first burn test.

 

3. Being back on my bike after a hand injury and the last deposit of snow and ice, I transported a 100lbs of food from the RV since we won't be living in it much longer. My operating room friends will quickly recognize some of the supplies I required for this motorcycle transport.

We're still alive!

H:
The last week has been an introduction to life with limited internet access.  We have been house sitting and alpaca sitting, that's right alpaca sitting.  No, they don't let us ride them and we really can't even pet them, but they love to eat and poop!  The poop has to be scooped up each day and disposed of to keep the alpacas healthy.  The place we're staying has limited internet connectivity so we have been MIA.

But we haven't just been sitting around waiting to scoop!  Oh no, we have been scooping other things too, but with a different instrument.  The last several days we have been immersed in sorting and preparing food packages for our hike.  We've also been testing out cooking some of these and are mentally exhausted from looking at all the different alcohol stove designs you can make.  From the complex to the simple to the super simple.

We made it home today for a bit to pet the cat, get online and do a spot of cleaning in the RV.  While cleaning Dave found a grocery bag full of smaller packs of dehydrated vegetables!  We thought we were done!  Now we have something to use to test out cooking re-hydration on the stoves we'll spend this next week building.  Pictures will be posted in a few days, hang in there, you'll see some interesting things soon.

It's not that I haven't wanted to share anything, it's taken this long for my finger to work well enough to type.

D
It may seem like you have plenty of fingers to type with until the one responsible for p ' and ? are needed, and it hurts enough to put you off typing at all.

At least when I fell down the stairs, it was too dark to see anything to grab hold of. It sounds scary, but at least it's a cool story to tell since I didn't bother to turn on the light to see which unfamiliar room I was going in. Yeah, it was preventable, most things you don't like happening are preventable, from a certain point of view.

Without telling many details of the fall, at work it caused some of my surgical co-workers to call for an early end to my version...it could have been worse. My neck, which has already had injuries, and my back are fine. It could have ended the trip for this year.

On a Sunday night, after a week of leave, I was getting ready to begin my last three weeks of work. One sudden event, injuring my finger, would take me out of work until my last official day. It isn't the way I'd planned on finishing almost 4 years of employment, but I embrace it as another one of life's circumstances you have to deal with and find your way around.

At a little more than 3 weeks so far, I am almost rid of any pain. It's a good reminder to me how fragile we are sometimes, and why this experience on the trail is so important to begin.