Our Zpacks package is waiting at the post office this morning. We ordered a new tent and packs and I have been waiting anxiously for there arrival. These two components could make our trip enjoyable or miserable.

The tent is the triplex and the packs are the arc haul. On the web they look like great items but now for the real test. Stay tuned…..

This box contains two backpacks, a tent, several stuff sacks and a cooking pot. My old backpack would not fit in there.

In Australia it is summer time for Christmas. Each Christmas morning the neighbourhood is filled with the sounds of excited kids riding their new bike, skateboards roaring down the road. Others, in small gangs, are laughing as they set up their new tents in the front yards just itching to get out and use them. This is how I was with our tent and, true to Christmas form, we went out the front of our house and set the tent up and climbed in.

We sat inside our tent looking out at the world just getting a feel of what our home for the next five months is like. I must say that on our first superficial test the tent feels good. It was easy and reasonably fast to setup and has plenty of room for us and our gear. Even our dog, Baxter, came down to check it out.

With the tent put up and taken down it was time to get back to the pack. We started gathering our gear and stuffed it into our packs. We have been working on resupply boxes for the last few days so had the food for our first leg from Crazy Cook back to Lordsburg ready. We packed the food into our packs as well our clothes etc to get a true feel of the pack under weight. So far I am very impressed, the packs are light!

 We plan to  start with low mileage every day to allow our bodies time to adjust. Our age may give us the means and time to do these things but it does mean we have to be a little more carefull.

As a consequence of walking less each day we will be caring a lot of food i.e. a lot of weight. However, even with 7 days worth of food and all our gear our packs are comfortable and a lot lighter than we were on the Colorado trail.  Of course we have not loaded the 6 litres of water we expect to carry each day but we can delude ourselves a bit longer that our packs won’t be supper heavy.

We went for a short 5 mile hike today with our packs loaded with everything except water and the packs felt very good. I am very impressed with the Zpacks equipment so far.

We plan to keep testing the packs on our daily hikes both to get us in shape and workout any kinks.

We are still waiting for our new sleeping quilt but just about everything else is in place.

It is getting very exciting now and I just want to hit the trail!  Only 35 more sleeps till we start.