Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Meghan's first post



Hi everyone!
This is my first ever blog post so we’ll see how this goes.
So the other day we finally got down to some serious business, a.k.a. planning our menu and doing a bit of grocery shopping.  We already decided that we were going to be eating the freeze-dried, Mountain House packets for most of our dinners just because it would make things less complicated.  Chris originally wanted to have two more detailed menus with more variety but I decided to put my foot down on that one.  I graduated college two weeks ago, and since I probably wasn’t going to be going back to Burlington anytime soon, I made one last trip to Eastern Mountain Sports to stock up on Mountain House.  In other words, I pretty much cleaned them out and had to have two employees help me carry them all to the register, BUT thanks to my discounts I ended up with 21 freeze-dried meals for roughly $5 a piece which I am considering a pretty good deal.  Since then we have been slowly accumulating more so we have about 36 which leave only about 2-3 dinners per week that we actually have to plan out.  But anyway, now that we had most of our dinners all that was left to do was to do lunch and breakfast.  Our breakfasts are going to consist of two packets of oatmeal a day.  We are going to be gone approximately 50 days so that would be 200 packets.  We did not want to spend a ton of money so we made a trip to Walmart and bought 17 boxes of oatmeal.  The lady at the register must have thought we had a few problems but we had fun trying to choose as many different types as possible, including the ones with Dinosaur Eggs that Chris picked out, in the hopes that we will not be oatmealed out by the end of the trip.  We are still trying to decide on some easy lunches and/or snacks and slowly compiling our stock of food.  Yesterday we also finished detailing our itinerary with daily objectives, start, finish, and our distance goals.  Our to-do list still includes:
-          planning a mail drop in Maine
-          making a list of phone numbers/contact information
-          directions for people planning to meet us at some places
-          list of possible fees for stays at campgrounds
-          …and more food
I’m getting really impatient now and just want to get this show on the road!  But, there is still one more week of work and possibly one more week of final preparations.  Although it was not my life’s ambition to do this like it was Chris’ I am excited to try something new, for all the things we will see and to be spending weeks outside sleeping in a tent!
That’s all for now!

 All of our oatmeal and our food packaged up by week.