15 days

15 days until we fly out to the east coast, 16 until we are on the trail, but then who is counting. Okay we are!! Sunday and some of Monday were taken up by food and gear prep. Sunday was a beautiful day and while we should have been off hiking and trying to get in shape again, we were instead seam sealing our new tent. We are going to be using the Gossamer Gear Squall Classic tent. This is a 2 person tent made of spinnaker cloth (read very noisy). The tent will require a trekking pole to stay up but we will have plenty of those with us. The tent seems a bit tight but considering how many shelters there are along the AT, I don't think a tight tent will be a problem. I'm not sure how many shelters we will stay at but having a tent along for just in cases, or if we decide to push on a few more miles will be nice.

We also spent much of the day getting ready and prepping food. We should probably be buying stock in freezer bags. We must have bought about 300 bags. We prepared a few meals from freeze dried meat, potatoes and corn or peas. We plan on mostly resupplying in towns along the way, but there are a few towns where the resupply is very slim to nil so we will supplement with a few well placed mail drops. I spend some time measuring out meals, and fruit. We then spent the rest of the evening laying out the food in piles and trying to determine where we had short falls. We are definitely short on breakfast meals, and a few suppers. Lunches we can either survive on the protein and energy chews or whatever we can find at gas stations for resupply. Our living room looks like a hiker invasion with hiker food all over the place. At least we have paths through the maze of food.