Packing for Patagonia

It has been a busy week plus. First I packed up at home and then to the OR show in Salt Lake City. There we tried to get all the last minute gear and food we could - mostly successfully. Then we sorted and packed and built bike boxes and ordered last minute things we hadn't gotten yet. The bike boxes were a bit of an experiment. We built them with 3 mil corrugated plastic, gorilla tape, velcro, some hardware... We made it so both bikes could fit inside one box nested in the other. Then for the race we will have a bike in each box without having much assembly and dismantling which should speed things up a bit we hope. It is a cool material, but our boxes are definitely somewhat experimental.

Things were pretty crazy. We got our last shipment of stuff around 5 pm and were planning on heading out at 9. However we were running on YogaSlacker time and didn't get out 'til after 10. At the airport we got all our boxes checked in - for the bike box coffin they thought it was overweight (it was, but only a few pounds, not 20) and they wanted to charge us an extra $75 beyond the $150 bike fee. The check in guy re-read the rules and we passed. They also thought it was way too big, but it was within 1/2 an inch or so. A few pounds over covered almost all our bags - I think one was 49 lbs and the others were 51 or 52 lbs. I won't even go into our 55 lb carry on bags. The flight was 12:50, so we actually had time, and managed to get onto the flight standby. On the way we were able to send out our location with the DeLorme inReach satellite communicator. It is pretty slick.

In Atlanta we rushed to international terminal to check in, then a friend picked us up so we could sleep at her place before the evening flight. I think it might be easier to actually sleep at night and be awake during the day.

Hopefully tonight we can get on our way down to Santiago.


LATER

We did get on the flight to Santiago that night. I even got in first class, which is a very civilized way to travel. Now we are in Santiago visiting with Jorge and Catalina and trying to figure out how we are going to get to Punta Arenas - either buying a car and driving or shipping our gear and flying or taking a bus. I think the logistics of getting all our gear together and to the race might be more of an adventure than the race itself... Of course I haven't done the race yet, so I could be very very wrong.