Blogs from Watertown, New York, United States, North America

A pretty uneventful day. Left at 9AM and arrived in Watertown,NY at 7PM. Ate at The Fairgrounds Resturaunt and was killer. Back at the hotel and ready for a beer! Tommorow we will by outside Qubec City on the St. Lawrence Seaway.... read more

A pretty uneventful day. Left at 9AM and arrived in Watertown,NY at 7PM. Ate at The Fairgrounds Resturaunt and was killer. Back at the hotel and ready for a beer! Tommorow we will by outside Qubec City on the St. Lawrence Seaway... read more

Hello everyone. We are getting ready to hit the trail again. Our plan is to drive down to North Carolina where we ended last year, park the car and shuttle down to Springer Mountain, GA. That is the Southern end of the AT, from there we will walk north the 287 miles back to the car. This should take roughly 30 days. We plan to do journal updates same as last year. The photos will however not be posted until after we return home. I think this will be the fastest way and save Matt his valuable personal time as he is working full time, doing his MBA studies and his wife is expecting a baby in August. We would still love to have you send us comments via the comment tab on the web page. ... read more

OD New boots for CC today. We drove to Syracuse and found new boots that are lighter and fit much better than her old ones. I swapped out my heavy boots for much lighter ones also. The average person takes about 2,000 paces per mile. 1 extra pound per leg means you lift a ton or more unnecessarly per mile per leg and 10+ tons per day lifted. It has also been calculated that one pound one your foot equals five pounds on your back. So by going to lighter boots we should be able to cover the same miles with less effort. We also ordered a different jacket set after returning the one we got from LL Bean. We have swapped out her light sleeping bag for my gore-tex shelled down bag, it is good ... read more

OD Well here it is two days before departure. We took all of our resupply boxes to be mailed out to Rochester and dropped them off at our daughters place. She will be responsible for getting them out to us on time. There was a total of 14 boxes. This has probably been one of the hardest logistical problems I have ever worked on. There are so many variables that we don't know I believe what I have done is just a real good guess. Loading it into the SUV I had to fold down one of the seats just to get it all in. Once down in Rochester everything was gone over, rechecked and packed away into the proper box. We left all the boxes open so they could be modified and adjusted according ... read more

Update from Patrick (aka O.D.) Been heavy into Thru Hike prep for the past two weeks. We have done some conditioning hikes with about half trail weight packs. Some on the roads and one on a walking trail in Clayton. We have done quite a bit of food prep with dehydration and vacuum packing. We are taking store bought meals in bags like "Lipton Noodles" that are flavored and bags, removing them from the original bag.. Then we place it in a vacuum meal bag and add our own dehydrated veggies, meat and maybe a spice or two. Then vacuum pack it to reduce the space taken up in our pack and keep it weather proof. The next step will be setting up each mail resupply box with the needed meals and any other things we ... read more

Unser letzter Tag bricht an... Nach einem letzten gemeinsamen Fruehstuck (nochmals vielen Dank und viele Hugs an Isolde, Steve, Christopher, Jeremy, Markus, Jessica, Jacob, Alex und Eric) bringt uns Isolde zum 'Watertown International Airport' - ein 'suesser', kleiner Flughafen. Taeglich verkehren hier 6 Flugzeuge, die Stimmung ist fast als familiaer zu bezeichnen und die Koffer werden noch per Hand durchsucht, weil sich eine grosse Durchleuchtungsanlage offensichtlich nicht rentiert... Wir fliegen mit einer kleinen Maschine nach Pittsburgh, von dort mit etwas Verspaetung nach Philadelphia, wo wir trotz (ganz normalem) Chaos auf dem dortigen Flughafen unseren Flieger nach Muenchen rechtzeitig erreichen. Der Flug verlaeft ruhig, aber an Schlaf ist trotzdem kaum zu denken. Vollkommen uebermuedet kommen wir am Samstag Vormittag in Muenchen an und sind dankbar, dass wir von Birgit un... read more