This post was written in Danish in July 2017 and later translated into English. Only the language changed.
A thousand thanks to all of you who have donated, commented and written to me! The support I have had is unreal 🙂
There is still a fair while before I leave.
Life goes on, and the next couple of months will probably pass quietly. I am going to start looking into the possibilities for sponsors – which would be a plus, but not a necessity. It depends what kind of arrangements come out of it.
I also need to start looking at some planning around the various stops along the way for resupply. I want to see if I can put together a kind of schedule, so I can roughly keep track of the days.
The plan is to finish in early September, so I have time to get home and get used to everyday life again. But I also do not want to rush through the trip, because I want the option of stopping in a town, or in the middle of nowhere, if there is suddenly some landscape I want to photograph.
So the idea is to do as little planning as possible, while still having a rough sense of a weekly distance target or something like it. And since there are towns on the route you have to visit in order to buy food for the next stretch, I unfortunately do have to think things through a bit – it would have been cool to just set off and take things as they come, but that is probably not going to work.
Never mind, planning and researching the options is exciting too.
In some places there is not even anywhere to buy food, or the selection is too poor or too expensive, and then you make sure to have sent a box of food ahead so you can avoid ending up in an ugly situation. The same goes for gear.
So it pays to work out where you need specific gear, so you are not hauling it around before you actually need it.
An ice axe, for example, is not needed for the first many kilometres of the trip, but if you send it ahead (you roughly know where on the route it is smart to have it on you) you can avoid having to buy one that is suddenly much more expensive than in the big cities (or sold out), and at the same time you avoid carrying it the whole way.
Same with spikes for your shoes and the bear canister.
This is where people who live in the USA have a big advantage. They can get people back home to send things, and when they are done using them they can send them back again.
I will have to give my used gear away, or drop it in a so-called hiker box, which are small containers along the route where people leave all the gear they cannot use any more, have too much of, or have got tired of using.
That is not a bad thing as such, but the ice axe and the bear canister are relatively expensive, and when I am done with them there are not exactly other hikers who can use them right then, and sending them home to Denmark is silly since it would cost a fortune. But that is just how it is 😉