Progress on Food Prep

We’ve started the big job of arranging our food for our Pacific Crest Trail adventure.  A lot of our food is pre-made, and what it takes is locating where to obtain it.  One of the best resources is Wal-Mart.  They have an amazing variety of quick-fix foods that are really cheap!

Here are a couple photos of our physical meal planning in our front room.  We started by looking at 5-day periods and making sure we had breakfast, lunch, snacks, and dinner items for each period.  We also arranged for some alternate foods to avoid boredom.  Like, breakfast is not always oatmeal.  We have a few freeze dried breakfasts, and some granola breakfasts.  There is always dried milk to add in for some more protein.  We do plan foods that have fairly high nutritional value to how much they weigh.  Also, we do not have foods that already have water added.  That would be too much weight.  Choice is made for taste as well.  Most everything we are planning we’ve had before and we like them.  Finally, we consider the amount of waste we will have to carry with us.  There is no burning of trash – AT ALL!  We stick to the “Pack it in; pack it out!” rule.

We’ve got lots of Pilot Crackers in those cans but we will need 6 more cans of 62.  Packets of salmon and tuna are cheap and tasty.  We add them to rice, noodle, and pasta packets.  We also use packets of mashed potatoes (Yumm!)  There are lots of different flavors, many with CHEESE and we add summer sausage for fat, protein, and calories.  

Yes, there are 27 10-ounce summer sausages.  Another strategy is the use of freeze-dried meals.  We looked at a Costco offering of a bucket of meals, mostly for disaster planning.  We’re going to break into the buckets and re-package them for our trip.

Lots of people ask about how we’re going to carry that much.  Well, we don’t.  Our daughter in Puyallup is going to be our supply shipment coordinator.  Using already established post offices, resorts, and town services, she will ship resupply boxes to arrive ahead of us as we move north.

Here is the list of resupply points.