Equipment and Food Decisions for Backpacking

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Today Dale and I started making a mega list of everything we need to take; underlining those items we still need to buy. We decided to just rent down sleeping bags rather than spend $600+ per bag. We will also rent a tent for the 3 kids. We’ll use our Coleman tent for us, it’s a little heavier than a backpack tent but we already own it and it is only a couple of pounds more.

I wanted to buy a solar charger for the phone and camera but what I really need/want is really more than I want to spend and larger than I want to carry. A simpler solution is not to use the phone much, I’d wanted to use it to post blogs if I could find service at all, and to buy a 2^nd battery for the camera then have 2 charged batteries. If I were writing a professional travel blog then I’d get the fancy stuff but alas I’m not there yet.

As for food, and I do promise to give more details about the meals later, I’ve been going back and forth about fresh veges vs. canned. We will be in the high country for 5 days so it is iffy carrying fresh veges if they’d even last that long, but canned might be heavier and won’t taste as good.

I had the idea that I’d carry dried beans for chilli as I’ll carry a larger cooking pot anyway. I looked online and saw that cooking beans at high altitude takes twice as long and are crunchy. Guess we will stay with canned beans for that meal.

As for wine, I was going to look for small bottles of wine to carry instead of a regular sized one. Now I think I’ll look for plastic bottles with screw type lids and put the wine into those. I was going to carry up some everyday wine but think I’ll instead take a better, bigger (taste) red wine. It might go well with the cold nights plus tastes so good!

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