Is it time to panic yet?

I think we are finally done shopping for food for the trip. One whole room in Tom's house is full of boxes of food. We have re-packaged everything into individual meals and servings and now they are sorted by meal type, waiting to be put into priority mailboxes and shipped along the trail.

This whole experience is already outrageous, and I haven't even set foot on the PCT. I don't stress out easily, but the past week has been a bit tense, and intense. There is just so much to do- between shopping and packaging and figuring out mailing addresses. And the idea that if we get an address wrong, or mail a package too late, or something (anything) happens to it, we will be very hungry for a few days...is slightly stressful. I lost sleep last night fretting the unknown. Tom and I have just been working our butts off (we are dehydrating a batch of kiwis right now) and are starting to burn out. We are practicing focusing on the positive aspects of situations.

But this is planning on steroids. I have never had to be so organized and well planned before. It makes me feel like I have no flexibility, which makes me start to panic. But we are accomplishing a lot and are practically ready to leave (good thing, because we bumped our leaving date up to the 12th). Today we mailed our first resupply box, to Stehekin Washington (actually, turned out to be 2 boxes, with 8 days worth of food). That's another thing- turns out priority mailboxes are a bit small than we anticipated- so we will need to mail 2 to a lot of resupplies. But we are taking it all in stride...

The hiking is going to be a breeze compared to all of this planning. My brain is tired from so much thinking. I have been getting really overwhelmed lately, trying to figure out how many dinners we would need and how many Ziploc bags we would use in 6 days. Yea (I will have to apologize to my high school math teachers who argued that I really would use those formulas).

So we have a lot of resupply package packing to do. And we are going to head to Tom's beach house in Lakebay Washington to do some hiking and practice bear bagging and cook up some meals on our stove. And relax.