Nearly three weeks have passed since my last post full of angst and worry, and my kid and I are close to prepared for our backpacking trip.

Which is to say, we have our gear (see gear list below); we have practiced putting up our tent and lighting our miniscule stove; I have made a list of food to bring, though I haven't bought it yet; and we have packed a good bit of our gear into our new packs (not the food, but most of the rest) and hiked a couple of miles with them, just to see how it felt.

It felt good.

Without the food and last-minute items, the packs weigh only about 15 lbs.  I am estimating they will end up being about 25 lbs, give or take.  That is an ideal weight; conventional backpacking wisdom says we could carry up to 40, but I really wanted to keep it under 30 lbs.  I am mainly concerned about volume now.  Are the packs I bought (35 L) too small to fit everything?  We will see.

I learned, from my two-miles-hike, that I need to be careful to wear a shirt with sleeves that come well down my arms, so the backpack straps do not chafe my shoulders and armpits.  Similarly, my socks need to come up past the tops of my new, unbroken-in sneakers.  Basic lessons, but important.  More important was the lesson in which we both realized that hiking with our backpacks was not so terribly hard.  The scene from Cheryl Strayed's Wild in which she, an inexperienced backpacker, packs all of her REI purchases into her new pack (or hangs them off the outside of her pack, because she has bought too much to fit)... right there in her motel room, on the very morning when she plans to leave on her thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail... and then goes to pick up the pack and finds she literally cannot lift it... this is the story which is stuck in my head forever.  I expect to be unable to carry my pack, to be stunned by its weight.  But no, having taken Strayed's book to heart, I have considered weight with every single one of my packing decisions, quite ruthlessly.  And the pack is beautifully manageable.

***
Between writing the above, and what is below, I finished the food shopping and we packed our packs.

Here's what, between us, we will be carrying: 

• about 4 liters of water, divided into 5 bottles
•  trail food: instant coffee, tea bags, instant cocoa packets, nuts, dried fruit, and trail mix, baby carrots (for the first 24 hours), 2 Cup-O'-Noodles, jerky, graham crackers, chocolate spread, and marshmallows, Ritz crackers, wasabi peas, Snapeas, and some chocolate snacks.
• a camp stove that is basically a metal box the size of a deck of cards, and fuel tablets for it.
• 2 tin cups
• 2 garbage bags to keep our clothing, etc. dry
• 1 extra pair shoes, 2 extra tshirts, extra socks and underwear, extra shorts, a sweater-- for each of us.
• rain jackets
• sheets and sleeping pads
• 2-person backpacking tent
• books and a deck of cards
• maps and notes
• sunscreen and bug spray, hats
• flashlight for each and extra batteries, plus a battery-operated mini-lantern that looks like a fat candle
• first aid supplies, tiny scissors, blister kit, prescription medication, allergy pills and ibuprofen
• pocketknife
• camera and notebook, 2 pens
• hand sanitizer, little bottle of camp soap, toothbrushes and toothpaste, hairbrush
• $60
• 2 hand towels
• lip balm, bank card, mints, phone (the essentials from my purse)
• tampons and pantiliners (unfortunate timing there)

That sounds like a lot, right?  But we fit everything in, just barely.  And the packs weigh precisely 25 lbs-- well, my kid's is 25.2.  Here they are, standing at the ready.

Tomorrow we go.

This is a post about fantasy becoming reality.  I have long been an avid consumer of the backpacking memoir-- Cheryl Strayed's Wild being the probably unsurpassable pinnacle of achievement in this genre*-- and, for close to twenty years, I have dreamed of doing a long-distance hike myself.  (I had a boyfriend once who promised to hike the Appalachian Trail with me.  He also promised to marry me; I think we broke up about three weeks later.  Somewhere in our couple of months of crazy romance, though, we did manage to take a 39-mile hike together over two days, in 95-degree heat, sleeping on top of a sheltered picnic table in a public park in a wild rainstorm.  The fact that this remains a happy memory, even though the young man in question is a very unhappy memory, should tell you something about my love affair with the idea of distance hikes.)

Anyhow.  While I dream of distance hikes, the reality remains very different.  The longest hikes I take, of late, are a) back and forth across the floor of a very small restaurant-- which can add up to four or five miles during the course of a shift-- or b) a few miles down the perfectly flat C&O Canal towpath, and back to the car.  Even the latter have been occurring only a  few times a year, at best, due to schedule limitations and the limits of my teenager's interest.  Several things are true that I don't want to be true.  I am out of shape.  I am getting older.  I am afraid to hike by myself (not afraid of injury or misfortune or of animals, but of men).  On the other hand, I rarely have anyone to hike with, and I am constitutionally much more suited for doing things on my own-- I hate having to talk all the time, and I like being able to make my own decisions.  I'm not the hiking club type.  So, except in my dreams, very little hiking, let alone backpacking, actually takes place.
    
That is about to change, just a little bit.  And I am suddenly scared out of my wits.

So, sometime when we were still living in fantasy-land, my kid and I agreed that it would be fun to do a multiday hike along the C&O Canal towpath.  We have a fantasy of someday walking the entire trail (184.5 miles), and so far we have accomplished... 20 miles.  In about 2 years.  Of course, we've actually walked twice that, because each time we've parked our car, walked a few miles, and then retraced our steps.  Still.  Progress is slow.  So... wouldn't it be fun if we could get a good chunk done all at once, and NOT have to retrace our steps?  My kid enjoys camping, and we have never camped together (WHAT?? this just illustrates how distorted my self-image is).  So I suggested a backpacking trip.  To my surprise, kid embraced the idea.

So excited!!  I lived with this vague fantasy excitement for months.  And then, it hit me that this venture is actually supposed to happen in just a few weeks.  And I realized that I have absolutely no idea what the fuck I am doing.  Somehow I imagined kid and I walking along in the usual way with our daypacks full of small lunches and water bottles, maybe a book or two for rest stops, but with the luxury of days ahead of us and one night reserved in a real lockhouse!  Um, the lockhouse part is real.  Other than that: I think we might need a few more supplies.  Like enough food for three days and more water (although thankfully there is some water availability along the trail).  Like a tent and sleeping pads and light sources and raingear and ways to deal with inevitable blisters.  Pocketknives and sunscreen.  All the stuff you need to have with you when you are fucking camping.  And, surely, we will need proper packs to carry all this stuff in, which we do not have: either the backpacks, or quite a few of the other items.  And also.  Kid and I are not in great shape, we have not practiced carrying loaded packs, and I have perhaps hugely overestimated how far we can walk given the heavier load.  10 miles a day, give or take, doesn't sound like much under normal circumstances-- but the thing is, every time I have tried to go this far with kid, there has been much complaining, about feet and back and hips and knees.  This is without loaded packs.  Do I really expect the greater romance of a backpacking trip to entirely overcome kid's achy feet and intolerance for pain?  And why am I blaming kid?-- I am the blister queen.  In fact, I have one right now, just from wearing a particular pair of sandals on a walk of about a mile and a half.

What if we only last for 3 miles and then need to call someone to pick us up, and our cell phones don't work out there?  My cell phone doesn't work fucking anywhere.

This could be really, really bad.
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So, the up side here, for those of you unfamiliar with the towpath, is that we will be quite close to civilization.  The trail, for the most part, runs between the Potomac River and various access roads.  We will probably not die out there of dehydration, and there aren't any cliffs to fall off of.  (Well, there are, but they are not on the trail and we will be careful not to fall off them.)  If we can't cut it, we will probably be able to figure out how to bail.

But I don't want to bail.  And I don't want my kid to bail.  I want to do this.  I want to push through hardship-- and, yes, I know I have set us up for hardship-- and succeed, and meet whatever we encounter, which hopefully will not include men bent on violence, but I digress.  Another reason to bring a pocketknife, though. 

This afternoon I am going to REI to check out their backpack rentals, and maybe take advantage of their equipment expertise in general.  I say "take advantage" because I know I do not want to pay REI prices for most things, and feel vaguely guilty about browsing without much intent to buy.  But maybe I can get a better sense of what I need and want, how much it weighs(!), and whether it makes more sense to rent or to purchase outright.  I'm doing this preliminary scouting without kid, so that I can't be talked into any impulse purchases.

Really, though, the rentals and purchases should probably be made by next week.  That gives us two weeks to do things like practice putting up our tent, and try walking around with the loaded packs, and think of all the small items we need that we almost forgot to bring.  June 30 is the day of reckoning.  In my heart, I know that I am going to love this.
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*But, also, Bill Bryson!  Jennifer Pharr Davis.  Leslie Mass, who somehow managed to irritate and bore me (along with, it seemed, many of her hiking companions), and yet stick in my memory like no one else.