we made it to the west coast.

Tom and I arrived in Seattle late last Wednesday night, and are now all settled in. We did a gear run to REI today to take advantage of their huge sale for our last minute items, but immediately regretted it because there were far too many people there.

The last few days have been really productive in trail planning and purchasing as well. I read all of Yogi's Planning Guide, and feel like I am about to burst with knowledge and tips. Tom and I have also started the incredible undertaking of putting together our resupply boxes. Most PCT hikers buy their food in towns along the trail, but because Tom and I have such restricting diets, we would be living on peanut butter and...toothpicks, if we tried this method. So, instead, we have to buy all of the food we are going to want for the next 5 months, box it up in priority mailboxes, and enlist Tom's wonderful mother to ship these to us along the way.

This is incredibly overwhelming, though. Not only is this everything we are going to eat for the next 5 months, but we will also be consuming 5000+ calories a day- each. This is a ton of food. Today I almost had a breakdown sitting in the middle of piles and piles of non-perishable food, and trying to figure out what we could eat everyday to equal enough calories. 5000+ calories is an unfathomable amount of food for me right now.

So far we have gone to PCC (a local coop) and Sams Club (where we dropped over $400), but we still havent made a dent in our shopping. It is a fun experiencing tossing tons of each item into the basket, and just being able to grocery shop in excess (but not have to feel bad about it, because it necessary).

We are also continuously reevaluating our itinerary. (Now Tom is writing. Jenna is working on the itinerary as I type).

Back to the topic of a 5,000 calorie day. Though I pride myself on being a powerful and intimidating eater (I often wish that there was such a thing as a vegan competitive eater, but unfortunately, most eating contests seem to revolve around meat/cheese foods and not delicious things like cauliflower or indian dhals), I don't think I can possibly eat all 5,000 calories. Just thinking about it makes my jaw hurt. I read about somebody in Yogi's book that started at about 180 lbs (which is a few pounds lighter than I am), and went down to ~150 by halfway through through the trail. Despite all our efforts on getting as many calories as possible, I think it is highly likely that I will come back from the hike as a pile of skin and bones.

On the food we currently have bought/dehydrated:
I would guess that we have approximately 1/5 of our total food purchased. We have half our breakfasts (six boxes of 55-count instant oatmeal), 3 huge boxes of minute rice, tons of cliff bars/granola bars/other energy bars, lots of vitamin-I(buprofen), drink powders, ingredients for gorp, and lots, lots more. We even brought back about 10 pounds of granola bars from the east coast (it was a luggage packing nightmare, but we got a great deal on them!)

Jenna and I are also busy dehydrating. Currently, the dehydrator is humming with zucchini chips and (formerly frozen) corn. The zucchini chips are great! We are excited to munch them with some fantastic foods hummus for lunch. The first batch we dusted with garlic salt, which in retrospect was a mistake. It, for some reason, made the zucchini taste like fish. Gross. The unflavored zucchini chips however are awesome! They taste great and have a great crunch.

We are off (to steal packets of honey from Starbucks). Sorry for the discombobulated post, but we have a lot on our minds.

<3 Tom and Jenna