Day minus 3 Wednesday – More Preparations

On the left above is my new sleeping bag made by Cumulus from Poland (314gm) with the old for comparison on the right. (896gm). In the middle is a very unfashionable Size 11 Croc to indicate the size.

What has consumed more time than anything else in the past few days has been setting up this blog, and learning, or more accurately remembering, how it all works. I think I have got there now. But it is good to have the donkey work done at a computer as it will be that bit more difficult to make significant changes in the layout and inner workings on a tablet.

Then there is the thought of being away for nigh on 100 days. I think that seems a bit daunting at this point but once on the way I don’t think it will loom so large.

There was a a time when choosing socks, and shoes, and a rucksack was important. Now it seems to be choosing the right apps for use along the way. I am talking a paper guidebook, in Italian, to get me to the Swiss-Italian border. I like real books. After that I have an English guidebook from Gran San Bernardo to Rome, which I have posted on to Lausanne, along with some nifty maps which you tear off a day at a time and throw away. I usually record my track using GPS on my running watch and upload it to Strava. I have tried to use things like wikiloc and maps.me without a whole lot of success. I think only once I really needed to use Google maps on my phone when I got very lost near the French-Spanish border on the Baztan route from Bayonne to Pamplona. It was immensely useful on that occasion.

I am taking a small NT and everything else will be on Kindle, on a ‘Kindle-Kindle’, on my phone Kindle, and on the tablet Kindle. I have the Lightfoot guide and the Raju guide on Kindle. I think you cannot have too many guidebooks(!) but you can carry too many guidebooks. It is nice to be able to read something about the landscape and cityscape for the day apart from just the route.