One Week Count-down

It's been a couple weeks since we've last updated. This is because our routines have dramatically changed since the last blog. As of the Friday before last, March 16, Lindsay and I parted ways with our day jobs. It was tough, but necessary. We both had pretty resounding exits.

Now that our jobs don't consume our lives, we have more time to focus on preparations. I'm happy to say that dehydrating is just about complete. We've been ripping apart dinners,(Hamburger Helper, Pasta Sides, Bear Creek Soups) and partitioning them into meal sizes. We get all of our bags of dehydrated ground meat, chicken, corn, tomatoes, peas, beans, and okra and place them in the bags with the meals. Using the Backpackchef.com method, we pack a dinner, snacks, lunch, and breakfast into a vacuum sealable bag for our homemade MRE's.

We mark them to let us know if contains meat or fish as Lindsay does not eat meat. We will then distribute to boxes to be shipped. The idea, originally, was to have one for every potential night on the Trail. We have adjusted that seeing how I will be consuming many cheeseburgers and won't need to rehydrate as many meals. Nevertheless, we are still working towards making as many meals as possible. In addition to all that we've purchased, a ton of food as been kindly donated to us from our awesome friends and family. I do believe we have enough to eat very well every night. Now for the crunch time event: organizing all the food! We have a long ways to go but I have faith we'll complete it within the next couple days.

This past weekend has been packed with going away gatherings. We have a lot of people behind us on this adventure. They are psyched on the journey, the idea of the journey, and the films and paintings to come of it. We feel the love and will throughout our hike. 

I've been feeling much more confident about the construction of the film within this adventure. If nothing else Chaser's new backpack camera set up has performed flawlessly. The shaky, 95% unusable footage is a thing of the past. We were able to attach the camera much better than before. The test results have turned out incredible. It's funny, when I was first tinkering with the idea of Chaser having a camera, I did some Google searches on how other people have connected cameras to dogs. Not a lot out there and they didn't seem to work that well. I hope I have time to post a little footage before we go. The real beauty about Chaser's cam is that we will have no way of looking at it until after we get back. Good dog.

Chaser also got a microchip implanted, just in case. We opted out of trying dog booty after dog booty even though it was quite a funny site. He looked like a show pony plopping around. Instead we are going to treat his paws with pad enhancers. If this isn't as effective as we hope, we'll submit to booties.

We may not have much time to post another blog before we depart for the mountains. It's here. It's finally here. Stop talking, start hiking. We are very excited and look forward to keeping everyone who cares so much updated.

There are too many contributors to count in the last 2 weeks. We have been truly blessed by a lot of people. We thank all of you for believing.

Even Stella, my best friend, Dustin, and his awesome girlfriend, Logan's, baby showed up!

Too cute.

Oh wait, there will be one more post of a guestimated mail drop list.

See you on the Trail