What Now?

So. The blog. We started this blog to keep everyone informed while we were in Japan and to act as a journal of sorts for our adventures abroad. Now that we're no longer living abroad, we'll still blog interesting things we get up to, like house remodeling, adventuring, places we visit for conferences, and major life things (kittens!), but if you're not family or friends, you may not want to follow us around anymore. Posts will be infrequent, since as grad students we don't anticipate doing blog-worthy things too often. At least, we assume no one else will be as fascinated by the research methods, papers, and statistics we'll be dealing with.

Grad school starts in August. It's April. We've got time for one more adventure! For the next four months, we'll be attempting to hike the Appalachian Trail. Hopefully we'll make it from Springer (in Georgia) to Katahdin (in Maine) and we'll be checking in when we can along the way. That won't be often, but we'll have a Google Map of our progress as well as posts whenever we can stop in a town to upload our pictures and write about where we've been. Thanks for reading!

We'll put a round of pre-actual-trail pictures in this post too.

Pretty much everything plus at least six days worth of food, spread out on the floor.

The bags weighed in at 32 and 35 pounds (Ana / Lee), including food and a liter of water each.  To completely fill the water tanks would add an additional six pounds to each bag, but we won't have to do that unless we're passing through areas with fewer water sources than normal.  The volume and weight of initial food is considerable (~15lbs), but will thankfully decline as we eat it, making it less of a chore to get everything in the bags and to carry them. 

The official "start" pictures in full gear, etc, will be in the next post, which might be some time coming, since we can only get to the internet when we find a hotel with a PC available to use. We started on the 15th, and the weather is looking fantastic. Wish us luck!