Zen and the art of the Re-supply

Every hundred miles or so we need to get off trail and re-supply - food, cooking gas, new shoes, snow gear etc.

Stops in town feel like a trip to a city of vice. On a day hiking into a town to re-supply we find ourselves whiling away the day's hike thinking about which vices to satiate first: wifi, social media and news, a beer, doing nothing, satisfying a craving - for hamburgers, coffee, milkshakes, steak, wine or whatever else it was that you decided you needed after another meal of dehydrated lasagna and stock-cube soup.

There's also the matter of getting food and supplies, charging the battery, updating blogs, downloading pods, washing clothes and selves and eating lots and lots of calories. So, to maximise our vice time, we plan a strategy to get the boring, but vital, shit done first, and quickly. We assign tasks between ourselves and, when the trail passes close enough to a town, we stick out a thumb for a hitch.

It rarely go to plan.

The goal is to get in and out so that we only lose about 10 miles of walking time....I think we've achieved this once, in trout lake, waaay back in Washington.

Several times our resupply packages haven't arrived, or delivery was refused or goods sent to Nevada or Georgia. Too often we've arrived in towns on a Sunday or public holiday. And recently, in Sierra City, the storeman didn't open his shop on the day we arrived because he'd had a big night the day before...respect, but not helpful. (To make matters worse, the pub shut at 2pm.)

The culprit? In weaker moments I might have found some level of culpability in our disorganisation, but not in this blog. Where's the fun in planning ahead? In our old lives we couldn't even do weekly shops - because who can say what they'll want to eat on Tuesday when it's only Monday!? So what chance of us organising 140 days in advance? None. Further more, it's been fun 'making do' with what local shops have along the way. And, we might never have discovered Mounds otherwise (chocolate covered coconut bars of unadulterated joy).

No. The blame lies with an old foe, US Postal. Yeah, them. The guys that ruined a decade of Tours de France by dominating the pelaton in service to one Lance Armstrong, making you watch the Sprint stages over the mountain stages, because at least they were 'races'. Well, that episode didn't end well for them. Unfortunately, this time round, it's us on the receiving end.

Stuff sent by USPS or to a USPS store has a habit of not making it.

In Tahoe, we were beset by USPS inspired misfortune:

We got into town with enough time to get to the post office and collect our bear cannisters (we were about to hit the Sierras, where the bears are smarter than your average bear, and special cannisters are required if you want to keep your honey and skittles safe). The post office hadn't received our package. This was a real set back. It was Friday and, with snow approaching (the spreadsheet predicts it in about 15 to 20 days), we couldn't afford to wait till Monday. Disconsolate, we did the only thing we could, said 'fk it, it's tomorrow Jenna and Neil's problem', and went to an all you can eat Chinese buffet.

On the way to the buffet, we walked past the 'other Tahoe post office'. It had just closed. We walked on, the cookies better have more promising fortunes.

As we would later discover, that PO had already returned our package to sender... laughably, the sender was USPS.

We had a hotel room for that night, so we enjoyed dinner, with our mate So Good, a shower and comfy bed.

The next day, like so many town days before, was manic. We raced from shop to shop, buying food, searching for a bear cannister and posting more supplies down the line for us to collect later*, clocking up more miles up and down shop aisles than on the trail.

No less exhausted for our efforts, we finished our missioning by 5, slumped on some grass and finally had some downtime, before the lovely Grace gave us a lift back up the mountain to the trail, back to the simple, solitudinous life on the PCT.

*That package, no surprises, was not accepted by USPS and now sits at an airport somewhere in South Cal, bananas rotting in the sun.