Progress on my To Do list is slow, very slow. I am still shooting for getting on the road by July 17th, but it will be tight. If I cannot leave during a Saturday-Monday window, I will have to postpone the departure for a week because on weekends, campsites in the US are impossible to get into on the fly during the summer, and it will take me about four days to get out of the states into Canada.
I decided to triple up on my weekly physical therapy sessions because progress on my right leg has stalled, if not taken a step back. Contrary to what I wrote just yesterday, if I was scheduled to leave today, I would be postponing the trip to do more PT.
If I accomplished one big To Do task today it was to pick up the hard-copy maps and camping books from AAA and elsewhere. Required reading (taking, actually) for all my trips are the thick Woodall-AAA camp books, all five of them (see photo), so I dropped by the AAA office today to pick them up, along with a thick pile of maps for states and provinces I know that I will be doing more than just flying through. Google and other internet-based maps are nice to have access to from time to time, but I would never take a trip without the paper maps. (Remind me to tell you sometime the story about the maps I picked up for my backpacking trip on Kamchatka in 1997.) I learned a long time ago that without a map, you are lost, and I stick by that rule religiously. You have to have a map to know here you are headed, unless you are going nowhere. On my trips, my maps get their own “room,” the map room, which might as well be labelled The Crown Jewels because of the respect and treatment they get.
Incidentally, notice the Milepost guide (book, really) in the front right of the photo. Again, required reading. It is updated each year and someone would have to be foolish to set foot in a vehicle in Alaska and northwestern Canada without this indispensable guide. I have bought a copy for most years from 2000 to the present and would never dare to use last year’s.
Tomorrow, the Defender goes back into the shop for a few more final enhancements, e.g., new headlights, a set of auxiliary lights for setting up camp in the dark, and a backup camera to connect to my Garmin. More on the Garmin, my first GPS ever, in a future posting.
Donner’s backup name tags arrived in the mail today just in case he loses his along the way, which has been known to happen. I am taking no chances on this trip that he will get lost, or lost for very long. If my maps are the crown jewels, that magnificent creature is the crown itself, or maybe the next in line of succession.
That’s it for tonight.
Ed, from DC
ED
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