Baby Steps

Since my last entry, we here have made a few inroads on getting ready for, as we call it, "The Great Migration"

We decided to call it that so that we can ease the two younger boys into the idea of walking that far without alarming them. They'll be busy objecting to walking 788 K, or roughly 489 miles, which will take roughly 2 months to walk.

Barring big delays, sickness and other assorted crises.

(I'm tired already)

We figure the eldest boy will settle back into walking just fine, and B and I have always enjoyed walking, so no problem there once our bodies settle back into it.

This morning we were looking at routes, and we think we have a rough one laid out.

Over the past few days we've been looking at equipment and supplies and skills.

We've learned that we have a fire tinder quite close at hand , and in copious supply. (Yay for jute twine!) It's an easy enough thing to wax it too so we have dry tinder no matter what the weather. We have emergency candles. We have one wool blanket and a crank flashlight.

Not much for now.

But we have been scoping out camping supply companies, sports equipment supply houses; seeing what's available and what's frivolous. we've been talking about how to keeps spirits up when the boys realize their Game Boys will no longer work as they're used to. Games, books and so on. Honestly, we would miss our iPods. But apparently we may not need to miss them too much. As a friend pointed out, ebooks and the like can be charged now by solar power. which means, in theory, so could the iPods and Game Boys. So we've looked into solar power sources. It may all be a temporary band-aid, but if it gets the boys north in a happier state of mind, then I'll invest in it. We've been doing a lot of talking about how much water we all need. We've learned about on-the-go water purification and storage.

We figured out that we may even be able to take out bikes up, instead of walking. This would cut down greatly on our travel time. Of course this also means a change in cost of the migration, weight considerations and a myriad of other things. So we're still talking about that one.

But our guts are telling us we'll be walking.

Realistically, what B and I are talking about doing, is taking a day even at this time of year, just striking out and seeing how far we can walk, in winter boots, until a certain time of day, and then figure out how far we walked.

My thought is that if we do this experiment in winter, wearing boots, we might have a fair idea of how far the two youngest boys can walk. Remember too, we'll have two dogs with us as far as we know.

So we'll look at doing that soon.

For now though, it's time to head off to the job that will pay for all this.

More tomorrow!