We have to start somewhere! Actually, we wanted a trial, "tune-up" destination to check and make sure that our gear is completely ready.
It turns out to be quite a challenge to get the gear for 18 months of travel down to just two backpacks. We are packing for both camping as well as more civilized life. The packs need to be suitable for multiple day treks, as well as for checking on planes and hauling around towns. We need to be ready for sub-freezing in northern Japan, as well as very hot in the tropics. There is lots of stuff that would be handy to take, but the art will be to take as little as possible.
Our shake-down trip was in California. We visited Death Valley, and camped in the San Bernardino Mountains near Big Bear.
Death Valley is really quite beautiful. And quite dead. Much of the time it was overcast, which basically means you feel like you are in a gravel pit. But when the sun did come out, the rocks take on incredible colors! We got two sunny intervals, and were able to take in most of the sights.
We saw something quite bizarre. We were driving down the road at dusk, and saw something in the highway. We slowed down and then stopped. It was a fox! He began circling the car, just the way a pack of wolves will circle the prey before they attack. We figured that people must have been feeding the fox from their cars, and he had learned to beg for food. Since it would be unhealthy for him to eat our food, not to mention unhealthy to teach him to stand in the road at dusk, we chose to not feed him and slowly drove off.
We also made a bunch of minor adjustments to the gear. Fran made several specific ditty bags just the sizes we need. Rod made a cable for locking the packs. We figured out how to cook dinners with just a few minutes of fuel on the stove (we have wind screens and reflectors to aid in boiling the water in just four minutes, and then after we pour in the noodle, rice, or whatever, we bundle the pot up in Fran's polar fleece hood and it stays hot enough to cook without further fuel).
