Briefly, we taking a two-day hiking trip tomorrow - the first time for Jenna and I. To be honest, I feel that we're in over our heads with the four-day hikes we have planned for Europe. We should have done this sooner, but things didn't work out in our favor. Anyway, we're doing it now, with impossibly huge full packs, supposedly representative of the equipment we would take to the Laugavegur hike.
The question, to me, is this: if we didn't pack for multi-day hiking, how much easier would it make the rest of our trip? The answer, I'm unhappy to report, is: not much. We could dispense with the camp stove, sleeping pads, and tent: maybe 10 pounds of stuff, spread between the two of us (for the purposes of the backpacking trips, we also have food, but we wouldn't be carrying this around from city to city, so I'm not considering that part). True, our packs would be less bulky. Somehow most people backpack through Europe with regular backpacks; I don't think that Jenna or I have anything extraneous, and yet it's a struggle to get everything into our super-size packs. I've even looked through suggested packing lists for hostel-to-hostel student travelers, and, if anything, we're carrying less stuff than recommended.
We'll see how tomorrow and Wednesday pan out. I really want this aspect of our trip to work, but I may have procrastinated too long, or overestimated my skill and strength. I'm still really pulling for our hikes to work, but I want to balance it with realistic expectations of what I can (and am willing) to carry around for the next three months.
More about our visits to our respective homes to come.
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