One day in the life of Neil and Dennison...ovich

One day in the life of Neil and Dennison...ovich

"The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favours, it always wants more tomorrow." 

Alexsandr Solhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. 

We aren't facing 3, 653 days in a Siberian Gulag, but 4,265km hiking mountains isn't nothing. And like the prisoner dealing with 10 years (plus 3 days for leap years), you have to break it down, compartmentalise. 4,265km becomes 5 sections, each with their own goal: Washington - learn and survive; Oregon - do it in 21 days, make up time; North Cal - dodge fires; the Sierras - head down, get up that mountain; the Mojave - bust it out and get to Texas in time for Thanksgiving.

Sections then get broken down into resupply town to resupply town - about 100 miles per leg.  And resupply to resupply becomes day to day: wake up, walk and repeat. This blog is about one of those days: 

The alarm sounds off at 5.45. I'm usually awake. It's a bad habit I have, of beating my alarm. Sometimes I squeeze in 20 minutes of reading, sometimes I plan the coming day, sometimes I just stare at the sky through the tent top as it slowly lightens into morning.

If Jenna ignores the alarm too long, I bug her until she gets up.

The morning ritual is my favourite time of the day. It's the simple efficiency of our morning routine, and the hot porridge*, that I love. We're up and decamped in less than an hour and it all happens automatically, chilled and unrushed. Over the days, weeks and months we've refined the routine into art. Everything happens in concert, rehearsed, undirected. We get up, the tent comes down and the water boiled, food for the day is organised and we are packed and dressed before sitting down to milky porridge and planning the day ahead: how much water do we need, where is the water along the trail and how many miles do we need to do to make the next resupply, water supply, campsite?

Then the working day begins, packs on and walking before the sun breaks through over the hills and warms the freezing air.

Life on the trail is a simple one. Time and distance merge into a single unit, miles. We have lunch at 12 miles, not noon. We don't walk for 12 hours a day but for 25 miles. We aren't concerned with work, deadlines or the usual weekday trevails but with keeping the wretched stomach satisfied with calories, finding water and with miles.

The day is broken up like a day of cricket, punctuated by morning and afternoon tea breaks and lunch, and drinks breaks in between each.

We do 5 miles or so before stopping for morning tea. Where we stop depends, like most things, on the availability of water. The morning session has an unofficial embargo on podcasts. Instead time is passed with banter and a recap and diagnosis on what happened in The Magician from the previous night's reading (I read it to J at night until she falls asleep). Sometimes we plan our next holiday (which will not involve walking) or our post hike holiday in Mexico. I also spend the time going over my 'to do' list of things for when we get back to aus.

Morning tea consists of breakie bars, protein bars, or some other nut bar, and a good drink of water. If all goes well, we've had 1000 calories by morning tea.

With the podcast embargo lifted, we kick off the late morning session with a bit of Spanish, then some podcast cast news (usually it's week old news and sport from when we last had wifi).

Lunch is tortillas. Sometimes we fill our tortillas with avo, tomato, cheese and tuna, sometimes with metwurst, sometimes it's PB and J.

During the afternoon session it's audio books for J and a mix of music, pop culture, US cable news trash and tech and space nerd stuff for N.

Afternoon tea is chocolate (m&ms, Snickers, Mounds, Hershey's), kettle chips, nuts, dried fruit and biltong. Don't judge. We burn 6000 calories a day. It's hard to keep up that level of fuel.

It's autumn here now (the fall). With shortening days, we've switched to dinners on the trail. We'll stop for an hour, around sunset, and cook soup and noodles then dehydrated meals with 2 minute noodles and olive oil (for extra calories). Then we night hike till around half 8.

At camp, the tent goes up and the cooker goes on for hot chocolate and supper (Oreos). J washes her bits and pieces and N puts a full stop on the day by smoking a ration of tabacco. If all goes to plan, we're in bed soon * Porridge done right: we mix oats with blueberries, shredded coconut, semolina, granola (for crunch) and some powdered milk (the mexican stuff has a bit of sweetness for flavour)

after 9 and catching up with Pug.

And that's a day in the life on trail.