Life turned upside down

Yesterday, I was gainfully employed, and living in a great condo in Porter Square. Today, I am "homeless" (in the safest possible way), and unemployed. Now I'm on my way to a bachelor party for the weekend, and when I come back, nothing will be the same. In just over 2 weeks, we leave Massachusetts, and won't be back until April.

As one of our friends says to their one year old when she cries: "so many feelings!"

This may surprise some of you, but I do have feelings. And right now, I'm feeling sad to leave behind so many good friends. It kind of feels like we're letting them down, in a way, by cutting ties or putting relationships on hold for 8 months. The amount of love and support that we've gotten from coworkers, friends, and family is amazing and humbling though.

I'm also way more scared than I thought I would be. We have a very comfortable life, and I am worried we will turn around in 2 months and say "what were we thinking???" (and not in a joking way).

At the same time, I'm still more excited than anything else, and sure that our crazy plan to hike the length of New Zealand is going to turn into the adventure of our lives. But it's still hard to say goodbye.

Tracking us on the trail

Here is a map that will be updated just about every day with our location while we're hiking!

https://spotwalla.com/tripViewer.php?id=7a5552165abb6e872

Moved! Sort of...

We "moved" today!  Except, we're still living in our condo, and a lot of our stuff is still here.

Visa crisis!

Visa crisis!

Staying in New Zealand for longer than three months requires a visa, so we went through the process of applying. To apply for a NZ visa, we had to mail a form, along with some passport pictures, proof that we have the means to leave the country when our stay is up, and our passports. Luckily we avoided needing to include chest x-rays to prove that we don't have tuberculosis.

Resupply

One of the common questions we get is about how we'll resupply food and other essentials while we're on the trail. All of our past trips have been short enough that we could prepare everything in advance - from food to sunscreen to batteries - and just mail packages to stops along our route so we could pick them up on the way. That is not going to work on this trip... Pulling together 5 months of supplies in advance is basically impossible.

Gear

Backpacking gear is really awesome. It continually amazes me how light and compact survival gear has become. Super lightweight, durable, waterproof/water resistent fabrics have made shelters, sleeping bags, packs, and clothes incredibly lightweight and compact. Extremely minimalistic backpackers can safely walk into the wilderness for days at a time with less than 10 pounds on their backs, which is slightly more than the weight of a gallon of milk. That doesn't include food or water, but it still boggles my mind.

Nerd alert: scraping TA trail notes from the web

Half of the fun of these long trips is the planning.  I used to think it was bizarre to enjoy the complicated planning and logistics that go into any long trip (hiking or not), but I've since realized that it's just part of my nature as a computer scientist/engineer, and I've embraced it.

One of the things I've been working on lately is gathering the trail notes for the TA into a compact form.  The trust that created and maintains the TA has a fantastic website with a lot of essential information.  One of the most important things available there are the trail notes - essentially, directions for the entire 3,000 km route.  They are available on the web as nicely formatted pages like this one.  They are also available for download in PDF format.

This is great!  Unfortunately, if you print out the PDFs, it ends up being close to 250 pages of notes.  Even if you split that up and only carry the notes for one section of the trail at a time, it's way more paper than we want to carry, and it's not as convenient to reference while we're on the move.