053111/2332 GMT, 1532 PST
Balboa Park, San Diego, CA, USA
We made it to San Diego. After doing basically nothing all day on the day of our departure from NYC we managed to leave the house too late and thus in a hurry. With an easy 160 pounds of luggage on our backs we had to run to the subway station. Our flight did not only leave from Newark, NJ, but also at an ungodly hour of the night, forcing us to use public transportation at a time when public transportation is more public than transportation.
Despite our best efforts to travel light the pile our luggage amounted up to was impressive. I’m not entirely sure how that happened. Maybe we exaggerated a little on real books seeing that we have a Kindle. Do we really need two travel guides for French Polynesia in hard copy? Maybe we overstocked our medical kit a little. Or maybe it’s because I’m traveling with a girl while the girl I’m traveling with is traveling with a dude who’s traveling with a girl. So there were a lot of girls involved in the packing process. Whatever the reason, we brought a lot of crap. You saw the list in my last blog entry.
The best thing about my 100 liter, 3 foot tall back pack is, though, as it turns out, that it sticks out over the edges of the scale at the airline check in distributing some of its weight to the scale's frame as opposed to the part that actually does the weighing. Even this way it came up just half a pound shy of the limit. With Wynne’s back pack being much smaller than mine we had stuffed it with most of our heavier belongings like the 5 pounds of back up batteries and what felt like 17 liters of sun screen (how much is that in cubic Fahrenheits again?). I jammed it on the scale between the wall and my back pack hoping that the wall would carry some of its weight. It worked.
That left us with our carry-ons consisting of a filled-to-the-rim 20 liter dry bag, a ukulele, two sleeping pads and our smaller back pack containing—amongst other necessities—40 pounds of books.
The funny thing is that the point of this whole ordeal was nothing more than just to get our crap to the boat. The real fun won’t start until we go hiking. Then we’ll have to cram everything into our two big back packs or at least tie things on to them. We have a four week Pacific passage to figure it out, and a couple pounds of seine twine to rig it.
No comments:
Post a Comment