Sew what?!

H:
Dave and I have ventured to my cousin's for the weekend because there is ample floor space for laying out material for cutting.  The RV just isn't big enough, imagine that.

So far I've made two stow bags!  Woo... lots of work there.

And I sewed the "Bat Wing" which is a way to close off the end of the tarp when wind is driving in rain:

Day 1 of sewing 2 stow bags, 1 Bat Wing:

Other than that we've cut the pieces for our net tent, tarp, and sleeping bag/quilt.  Our most challenging part was marking the lines evenly and keeping cats and kids from playing on the fabric as we were marking the cutting lines.  The room we were working in is a formal living currently empty of furniture so the kids and cats use it for doing laps.  The other drawback is that there are no lights in the room and we had to move in a low watt lamp once the sun sets.  Still... the work is getting done.

After the current projects are sewn together the net project will be cutting and sewing up our backpacks.

Thru-Knitter... is that a thing?

H:

It is now!  

In this post if you don't have any idea what I'm talking about you should talk to a knitter.  They're very interesting and informative people.  

I spend a lot of time knitting.  A lot.  When we went on our bicycle adventure I decided to not knit for that time.  I wanted to focus on writing a journal and riding our bike.  Looking back I realize there was a lot of wasted time when I'd finished my journal for the day and when I was just sitting on the bike!  We were on a recumbent tandem... I rode on the back... my job was to read the map and pass snacks to Dave.  I could have knitted so much, the only draw back would have been if I dropped my yarn!  Ah well.

For the six months or so that we're going to be hiking I've decided to knit during that time.  The decision of what to knit was a challenge though.  Someone suggested a sweater that I could put on when I was done with it.  I quickly squelched that idea because I don't want to carry continually increasing amounts of yarn.  Though it would be neat, and would only be between 1 to 2 pounds... however, pounds count on this trip.  The yarn that I would knit would be sent along in our restock packages so I would just carry a little at a time. 

Someone else suggested knitting socks to replace the ones I'll wear out on the trip.  That's a thought and maybe I will do some of that.  I think that using a long circular instead of double point needles would be a must, but my mind wandered to pulling the cable out of my knitting repeatedly as I took the knitting in and out of a bag.  Hm... maybe something else.  

Someone suggested hats.  Which is a thought.  I could knit the hat but then there would be decreases and the need to switch to double points for the top.  Then again, a lot of times I finish a hat on my 16" circular needle because I don't always have double points in the right size.  Sure, it's a bit fiddly treating the 16" needle like it's a magic loop needle, but I do it.  Same draw back to the magic loop thought... floppy cable getting snagged in and out of a bag.  

I finally came up with the idea of knitting ear-warmer style headbands.  If I took a 16" circular needle I could work up headbands in the round.  Simple, easy, one needle.  I could also work them flat if I really wanted to.  If I was desperate I could turn one into a hat.    

The nice thing about the headbands would be that they're rather light in weight, a nice little extra warmth, and upon completion I could simply hand the finished object over to the next hiker I met.  If a hiker wasn't present I could leave them in the shelters or hiker boxes along the way (hiker boxes are places where you can drop off excess items you have and even find something you might want).  A fun twist would be to ask the recipient to send me an email at some point that would be about them, their trip, their thoughts on getting the object.  Their response I would then be able to blog here.  

In that vein of thought I completely justified a stop at a brand new yarn store in Muncie, IN, when we were there today.  Brand new... as in open less than a week.  Yes, I have a large supply of yarn, but a little more can't hurt, especially if it has a purpose!

The shop was called Yarn Stories and was located in their "downtown" area.  The owner, Katy, said that "every skein has a story" and she's there to help you tell it.  Nice.  Very appropriate too for my little endeavor.  So... I bought a bit of yarn...

Four 50 gram skeins of Malabrigo's Silky Merino...

A 100 gram skein of Eco Duo by Cascade...

 A little more Malabrigo... One superwash worsted and the other a bulkier superwash.

And two skeins of Universal Yarns Classic Shades...

All will look lovely when turned into a soft, squishy and very warm headband.  How could a hiker resist?  

In explaining my intent to Katy today I went off on a little tangent about Desert Island Knitting.  If you could only knit one thing for 6 months what would it be?  So... headbands... yup, and maybe hats... hmm... maybe socks.  You know... my spinning instructor did ask if I was going to take any spinning and I do have that tiny Russian drop spindle.  Hm... maybe I don't need a change of clothes and can fit more yarn in my bag especially if one of the towns along the way has a yarn store!

MIA

We apologize for the temporary hiatus in blogs posts. We have had a next to nothing internet connection for the last month. Now that it is fixed we can get back to some reviews and info.

Bag it!

H:

When we started dehydrating food we looked into vacuum sealers and all that they encompassed.  Then I read several dehydrated food books and several people suggested double bagging with disposable zipper style bags.  Alright, sounds good, cheap, reusable.  But I need quite a number of baggies to hold all the food that we're dehydrating.  Dave picked up a small box of Ziploc brand bags when we got the dehydrator up and running and we're quickly going through them.  

I considered purchasing more at Meijer the other day when I was there.  I looked at store brand versus name brand.  Ziploc brand were running $7.59 for just over 100 sandwich bags.  I was just going to get the cheaper store brand... but then I remember seeing huge boxes of Ziploc brand at Menards and I thought I remembered the prices being a fair bit better than even store brand.   

I skipped buying bags last week and then I ended up procrastinating a little more.  Finally I bought boxes of Ziploc bags yesterday at Menards.  For once procrastination paid off!  The jumbo boxes of bags were on sale... $8.00 for 460 sandwich bags.  Wow!  Big difference in price there.  Same exact bags, just in bulk and one of those oddities that Menards carries.  

One thing I did pick up at Meijer last week was cans of pie filling.  They're full of fruit and sugar and we like to experiment with the dehydrator.  Below are trays of the pureed pie filling: apple, cherry, strawberry.  They have been drying for 12 hours and I will leave them overnight because it is too late for me to do anything with them now and they are still a bit tacky.   

Update on the pie filling dehydration:

The pie fillings didn't exactly dry.  They had far too much gelatin in the mix and they stayed insanely tacking.  So much so they stuck to the trays and my hands as I pulled them off and to everything else in my kitchen.  I'm posting some graphic pictures below... they look a little scary!  

Experiment FAILED!  

But don't worry, this won't go to waste.  Our worms will love to eat these (we vermicompost, if you don't know what that is... Google it).

Gobble gobble...

H: Thanksgiving this year we ate lunch with my cousin and her family.  While we maintain a vegetarian style diet most of the time, I decided to purchase a fresh turkey so that whatever was left over would go into the dehydrator and become jerky for our hike.  

My cousin and her family eat very similar to what we do so take a moment to think how funny it was for a couple of vegetarians to cook a turkey.  Not having cooked a turkey in over 10 years (and having only cooked one or two in my life) I picked a 20 pound fresh turkey.  There should be leftovers from that right?  

My cousin and I stayed up gabbing about everything until about 11:59 PM on Wednesday when we started trying to figure out how early we'd have to get up the next day to get the bird in the oven and ready by 1:00 PM.  Then we realized that the biggest roaster pan in the house was only big enough for a chicken.  A debate was waged as to whether we should go out right then or in the morning for a disposable roaster.  

In the end we ended up not going out.  I pulled a magic trick and sawed the turkey in half.  Actually I carved the bird into pieces and part went into the tiny roaster and the rest went into a crockpot which was a bit bigger than the roasting pan!  In the end we had a cooked turkey (the meat was very juicy) and a ton of leftovers, but it wasn't pretty.  After the turkey was all cooked up I finally looked at jerky recipes and they all called for raw meat!  

Another funny twist to the day was that my cousin had bought a frozen 13 pound turkey without telling me.  I took her raw turkey home and once again mutilated a bird to make jerky... later I found that the dehydrator's website gives instructions on how to make jerky from cooked meat!

Below you'll see a pictures of turkey pre and post dehydrated.  

Somewhere between four and five pounds of turkey dehydrated down to about a pound.  I need to get better at keeping track of before and after weights.  I dried both white and dark meat.  Though I had removed all the fat possible, dark meat is just inherently too fatty to store long term in the way we are doing it but it does taste very delicious.  One baggie of dark meat went into the fridge for immediate consumption and three bags of white meat went into storage.  

About half the turkey went into the dehydrator and the rest ended up in soup.  It was quite a lot of work for the end result.  In future I plan to use ground meats as I have read that this will produce jerky with far less work.  Additionally, I will be able to use high quality lean meats and have them freshly ground.  

I have also been reading several recipes for dehydrating tofu into jerky and recently had a taste of mushroom jerky so I'm very excited to try this both out!

All dried up...

H:

Food.  That's another big topic for hikers.  Okay, that's a huge topic and one that can be overwhelming.

I just finished reading a hiking resource book that discussed food in some depth and I don't know if I've learned anything.  The difference of opinions on this subject are so varied that the experiences of others make for muddled reading.  There are those who survive on Ramen noodles and hope while others prefer freeze dried meals.  Some send packages to post offices along the way and another group shops at whatever store they find in whatever town they come to.  

We're opting to dehydrate as much food as we can before we leave and then have it sent along to ourselves.  We will supplement with food from stores along the way. 

This is our borrowed food dehydrator maxed out at 12 trays and loaded with dehydrating frozen vegetables.  The dehydrator is wedged between the stove hood and the stove top but I wired it into place to keep an inquisitive cat from knocking the whole thing to the floor:

Our diet in "regular life" is complicated.  After many years of a diet that went from "whatever and however" to the far side of veganism, we settled into an ovo/lacto vegetarian mode.  If you don't know what that means... we eat vegetables, eggs, and dairy.  However, forays into world of meat consumption are permitted when we are served food at someone else's residence and recently when the eating of meat is a better option than other items at a restaurant.  We eat meat, at most, twice a month and often not at all.  For our hike I am occasionally incorporating high quality meats that we will have dehydrated into jerky.  

We got soul... I mean soles.

H:
Hiking, for a large number of us, means that we will spend many miles on the soles of our feet moving down an established path.  Yes, hiking means a lot more than that but for this installment we're just talking feet.

What one keeps between their soles and the trail turns out to be a very personal subject.  I have read books that push hard for BOOTS, yes boots in capital letters because nothing else is good enough for your feet.  Some suggest wearing light-weight hiking boots, because you're not going to be bushwhacking so why weigh down your feet but you need stability around your ankles.  We have a friend that hiked the entire Appalachian Trail in tennis shoes, he went through 3 pairs.  Still others walk trails barefoot, but this does limit you to warmer weather unless you are a very tough cookie!

We've debated for some time as to what shoes to wear.  We have hiked a good bit on trails in tennis shoes without trouble but we've been reading quite a bit about "trail runners".  Not having experienced "trail runners" we finally tired of reading online about shoes and worked our way to REI today.

Dave has big feet, size 12 to 13.  I have wide feet mainly because my littlest toes stick out far too much.  I've often wondered the purpose of those toes as they don't even touch the ground.  In the end I just resort to men's tennis shoes because they're typically wider and easier to find a fit.  But both of us have trouble finding tennis shoes that really fit so when we do finally find something we just know they're the right ones.

We worked out for a couple hours at the Y today then went off to sample shoes hoping our feet would be a bit more swollen than normal.  The first thing we tried on at REI was a pair of trail runners.  The pair we tried had a firm, and not very flexible sole.  They were incredible light weight and we climbed around on the rock they have in the shoe section without trouble.  The laces were adjusted with a sliding clip and were something that seemed like high density dental floss.  All the trail runners seemed pretty similar in style with varying degrees of sole stiffness.

Josh, our patient helper, talked with us for some time about the cons of trail runners and eventually showed us a pair of Keen Marshall low-cut boot/shoe hybrid.  I didn't have high hopes, but I never do when trying on shoes, and while these were "lower case" boots and not the big waffle stompers, they were still boots.  We'd come to see trail runners.  Still, we tried them on.

When I slid my foot into that shoe a mouse ran by, turned into a horse, and promptly rode off with a carriage that looked suspiciously like a pumpkin.  Josh said a few times that Keen shoes are known for running wider in the toe box and he was right.  I didn't even have to cut off that little toe like the wicked step-sister.  My toes never felt so free in a pair of shoes.  I opted to try a half size shorter as the shoes were so wide but when I put on my half knitted wool sock (good thing I'd turned the heel yesterday, more on hand knit socks another day!) I decided on my standard size.  The only addition will need to be a bit more arch support.

I looked over the plethora of shoes on the wall, picked up a few different ones, then looked at my feet.  When you have a shoe that fits that good, why keep looking... we each bought a pair.

My handsome prince picked one size larger than normal and was very satisfied.  With the help of another great employee, Stephanie, Dave was also able to pick a pair of minimalist shoes off the clearance rack.  These will be for wearing in the evening when we're "in camp."  They didn't have any that fit me comfortably so I will just keep checking back, we have oodles of time right?

Oh, about 120 days.