March 19th Update

Just a quick update since I posed in a while.

The count down is really on now 8 days till I leave Ireland (28th March) and 12 days till I hope to make my first steps on the PCT.

Its really hard to describe how I feeling at the moment about the trip, my emotions towards the hike are a real mixed bag, excited, nervous, excited, scared, excited, overwhelmed, you get the idea.

Before finishing up in work I had such good plans about getting in a lot of training hikes, unfortunately real life has intervened a bit, most of my time has been taken up with finishing up jobs around the house and getting it ready for my house sitters to move in next weekend.

One of the advantages of flying in from Ireland and planning on resupplying on the trial is that I don't have all the extra work of preparing shipping boxes of supplies.

Other things that have been going on in the last few weeks is some finalising of equipment, any mail order equipment that I needed is sitting in Boston (Thank you Dave) and should be getting sent to San Diego in the next day or so, this saved a lot of money on shipping but it means that the first time I will see some of my key equipment is when I get to San Diego and the first chance I will have to test some of it will be my first night on the trail (now you can see why the some of the nervous feelings are sneaking in)
It also means that my few days in San Diego are likely to be a bit hectic between equipment and food shopping, hopefully I'll still have some time to see a bit of San Diego as it is my first time there.

All required permits are now in.

• PCT permit, which covers access to the different wilderness areas and parks along the trail (otherwise you would need to get individual permits where required)
• California Fire permit, this is required to have any open flames in wilderness areas of California, which I will need for my alcohol stove.
• US visa, this is required because I will be in the US for longer than the normal 90 days that is normally available to Irish people, this was available from the Irish embassy in Dublin.
• Canadian entry permit, this is an additional permit that basically gives you permission to enter Canada via the PCT even though it is not a normal boarder crossing location, very simple to get, basically download a form on line, fill out and send off, I had it back in Ireland in less than 3 weeks and this included probably a week each way for postage.

So nothing really left except final get togethers with friends and family and getting on the plane.

I will try to get a few posts made form San Diego to update everybody on my progress and then regular updates from the trail.