Putting it Together

How do you organize a 60 day trip?

Any of you old enough to remember the line from the old TV show The A Team - "Don't you love it when a plan comes together?"

Working with Richard we established a section on CCR called Warner's Trip and built an area in the forums where we could discuss our plans and seek input as we went along.

Word soon spread - the forums were busy and the pages on the site grew as we began to create our lists of items to do, menu possibilities, equipment, necessary medical supplies etc.

Part of any undertaking like this is some emergency preparedness and so we scheduled a course in Wilderness First Aid and began collecting the medical supplies we'd need to stock a complete kit.

We scoured the many outdoor cookbooks we had looking for appetizing meals and then preparing them to test their applicability in terms of taste, ease of preparation and both packed size and weight. We need to be able to carry enough food to get us through a minimum of 16 days and it needs to be able to fuel our systems as we burn about 3000 calories per day.

Our dehydrator kicked into high gear as the piles of fruit, vegetables, spaghetti sauce, hummus and lentil puree were dried and packed. The only thing we didn't dry were onions ... not that we wouldn't need them ... its just that we tried it before and cried through six hours of drying time.

Many visits to our local bulk food and natural food emporiums were needed to collect the mountain of cereals, grains, nuts, seeds, beans and rice we'd use.

Maps were printed and posted on a wall for route planning.

An emergency gear and clothing list was started to insure that we'd have backup in case something failed.

As time got close we assembled the meals for the first 16 days and did a test pack of all our gear and food to assess both volume and weight. Packs weighed less than 55 pounds and our gear easily fit in our canoe so we were good to go.

To mitigate the strain we'd face over the 60 days we upped our workout schedule to 6 days a week ... doing both a weight and an aerobic workout each day.