The Schedule

One of the most important items for our upcoming trip is how to make it all work within our already (somewhat) established lives. Right now our plan is for a total of a 6-month trip. This six months includes the week or so between when I stop work and we actually get on the trail, walking all those miles, zero days, a return trip to Northern VA and whatever other time we manage to consume while we are out there.

In a nutshell, here are some approximate dates that we are working with for our hike:
- April 16, 2010: my last day at work
- April 17-18: Bring one car to my parents house
- April 20-ish: Drop second car and cats in Richmond with Sabrina's sister and her husband (basically, they are saints for agreeing to add two cats to the 2 cats and a dog that currently run their house)
- April 22 or so: Springer Mountain (still are working on how we get from Atlanta airport to there, but we will work that our better as we get closer)
- Late July-ish: Hopefully from somewhere in PA, we perform the flip-flop portion of the hike and train/plane/automobile to Katahdin
- Mid-October-ish: Return to the flip flop point and complete our thru-hike

We chose the flip flop in this way for a couple reasons, mostly to optimize our weather on the trip, missing the coldest weather in the south and getting to Maine after black fly season and before the weather starts to turn there. We hope that with this arrangement, we also miss most of the big jump-off crowds in March and early April in Georgia.

Over the course of the hike we are also looking at something on the order of one day or so of "zero days" each week to let us rest, recover and keep us fresh and ready to go for a whole 6 months. This combined with the food plan (see Sabrina's previous post) will hopefully allow for as enjoyable (if that is possible on a trip of this scope) of a hike as we can have.