Friday, June 20, 2008

I had a dream...

...that it was the night before my departure, and I hadn't made a hotel/hostel reservation! I was so mad at myself! I couldn't believe I had overlooked that very important detail!

Luckily, I still have 11-12 weeks to handle that!

I "mock-packed" my backpack last week. That was an interesting exercise. It weighed 20 lbs, which is 16% of my body weight. Backpacking experts advise that a person in good health should be able to carry 20% of his or her body weight. Those in intermediate health should be able to carry 25% of their body weight, and experienced and well conditioned backpackers (which I'm not!) can carry 35% of their body weight.

For me, this is how that would breakdown:
% of body weight=pack weight
20%=24 lbs.
25%=30 lbs.
35%=42 lbs.

So, how big is my pack? My pack is a 2500 cubic inch women's Kelty Redwing. Its empty weight is 3 lbs 1 oz.

Here's is a picture of it:

I'm not 100% convinced that it is big enough, but I am 100% convinced that it would behoove me to try to make it big enough, i.e. pack light!

When I was 20 I took a 3 month trip through Eastern Europe. I thought that trip with a $3000 budget was gonna be my trip around the world...oh how foolish I was, in more ways than one. I had a HUGE pack, probably about three times the size of this one. It probably weighed 50 lbs., but felt like 90 lbs.! It was like traveling with a whole other person, you know. When I would get on the train, I took up two seats - one for me and one for my pack. That drew lots of attention. I could hardly lift it, and there was absolutely no way I could put it in an overhead bin on a train or bus without help from someone. Not exactly the picture of self-sufficiency!

The only time the size of that pack came in handy in all of those three months was when I sat it in front of me on a park bench in Romania and slumped over it to sleep all day after I had forced myself to stay up all night when I found myself stranded in a train station. A bird shit on me that day too.