Camino de la Costa

Camino de la Costa
Leaving Colombres

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Wednesday, March 3, 2010

I Love Shopping?

Even I do need some stuff sometimes. So why not have the most useful, lightest (oh that wonderful heavy backpack that seems to weigh more every day, even when the scales say it weighs less; not a very wonderful magic?). I don't want to say I hate anything, but so far I have not been able to find a different word to describe my relationship with shopping. There are exceptions, however. Bookstores, and backpacking stores. Summit Hut, REI, Montbell, Campmore are the ones I know and love. There was Turecek & Hof in Vienna, Austria. They introduced me to many many great things. And the greatest one of those was a car-top tent. Oh, how I loved our tent! Thanks to it, we traveled far and wide with our children, and I think there are many people until this day who think we spent a fortune on our long road trips around Europe. In fact, we spent very little. We could probably count less than dozen times we actually had to pay for sleeping our family anywhere during all those years (some 8 years).
Backpacking takes a different kind of packing. No car to carry our household needs. So I prefer to pack ultralight. It hardly is ultralight, anyway. I always feel like a turtle that has to carry a disabled turtle on its back anyway. Walking the Camino de Santiago is easy, in a way. You basically need very little supplies, light sleeping bag, you don't have to carry food (some snacks are all you need, and dark chocolate and nuts fill the bill in the best possible way, to me at least), you need water at most for a day, no tent, no cooking utensils, no camping mat. Paradise! A hike in the US is so much more difficult than in Europe: no mountain guesthouses, no food, no drink, if there is water available than at least you must carry a good water filter and some other method of killing living organisms in it, at bare minimum you must have a GOOD sleeping bag even when hiking without a tent. But then at least a ground cloth, if you decide against carrying a sleeping mat. So even on a quite an easy hike, comparatively speaking, like the basic hike down to Grand Canyon, your backpack must contain not a small number of supplies. Oh yes, we do have a bible here that teaches a greenhorn how to's of American backpacking: Colin Fletcher's Complete Walker. Walking on American continent is a completely different experience than in most places on Earth, and particularly in Europe. Just a look at a population map of the world will show you the reason why. We are lucky this country is so sparsely populated. But for the likes of me (read: lazy), it is so tempting to backpack in Europe. Unless I can have some Gurkas to help with my burden. Richard would be ideal, but he is not the biggest fan of backpacking in general. Lamas, donkeys, mules. Hmmmm...

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