We're off!

So we're finally about to leave for New Zealand! Our flight to Auckland leaves tonight at 9pm from San Francisco. We're all packed, wearing the only pair of pants we'll have for the next 5 months, and about to mail our non-hiking gear back to Boston.

We've spent the last 3 weeks in San Francisco. It's been a blast. We went to two amazing weddings, picked up the last few pieces of gear we need, and sorted out as many of the logistics as we can. We also ate waaay too much awesome food. I guess it's good to fatten up a little bit before the trail, but I think we overdid it just a bit towards the end.

But, by far the best part about spending this much time out here has been catching up with all of our west coast friends. Liz and I are both pretty bad about keeping in touch by phone or email, and even when we can find time to visit, it's often a whirlwind long weekend with no time to just chill out and catch up. We actually had a chance to do that out here, and it was great. The only bad part was that it reminded us how much we miss everyone out here!

So, now we have 2 packs filled with our gear, and a resupply box filled with extra clothes, shoes, some food treats, and about 1000 packets of drink mix.

The contents of our resupply box - mostly drink mix, food, shoes, and clothes.
We'll be able to take things out of this roughly every two weeks, when we
go through towns with big post offices.

Packing up the resupply box. We'll check this on the flight to NZ,
then mail it to our first stop on the trail.

Everything (aside from food, water, and toilet paper) that we'll have with us on the trail

Packing up the packs

All packed! As the packer, it was my prerogative to load Liz's pack up and leave mine almost empty.
Just kidding - Liz's pack is bigger because we are checking that on our flight, and taking my pack as a carryon.

So our flight takes off in about 7 hours (ahhh!), and we're spending the day calling family to say goodbye, and packing up all of our real-life clothes to mail back to Boston. As much as we've enjoyed SF, we also feel like we've been in a bit of a homeless holding pattern since we left Boston, and are really ready to get on the trail.

As a quick reminder, you can track us on the trail here: https://spotwalla.com/tripViewer.php?id=7a5552165abb6e872. We expect to start actually hiking on Saturday, after spending a day or two getting over our jet lag and making our way to the start of the trail, so you should start to see updates on the map then. We'll also be trying to post an update here every time we go through a town, so check back every few days, and leave us some words of encouragement if we start having a rough time. Goodbye for now, USA!