Getting Ready

Well, I think its safe to say that the countdown is on. We start our hike Sunday, April 4th. I'll have an itinerary posted some time tonight or tomorrow along with information about mailing packages and what towns we'll be updating this blog and whatnot.

We finally have all our gear (actually, we're still waiting a two packages in the mail but should be here in the next two days). We were struggling to find everything and it was looking like we were going to have to buy some gear online and other stuff here and other stuff there... it was getting overwhelming. A friend of ours told us to stop by The Backpacker, which is a locally owned business in Columbia. It turned out to be our gear heaven! Rieppe helped us rummage through the store, and with the one stop we were able to get pretty much everything (minus the two boxes of stuff already in route in the mail). Check them out at www.backpackerqualitygear.com

So, needless to say, we owe a HUGE thank you to The Backpacker for having everything we needed and to Rieppe for all of his help!

Trial Post/Intro

Hmmm... ok where to start...

Well, Eric and I live in St. Thomas (the US Virgin Islands). We met down here in June/July of 2008 and are currently engaged. We got interested in hiking the Appalachian Trail through a series of events and have been planning for this for almost a year and a half now. We've been trying to figure out the best way to keep in touch with all our friends and family, and so far blogger seems to be the best option so we're trying it out now. :)

As we hike and stop in towns to restock, we'll also be looking for internet access in order to post blogs for everyone. That being said, we're not sure how often we'll be able to update our status and share pictures and stories and so forth... but hopefully those that are interested will be able to have a pretty good idea of where we are and how we're doing.

So we'll go from here...