My big chore for today was to shop for and prepare the 12 Daily Food Rations boxes. Each day’s rations consists of 15 items as follows:
Breakfast – Orange juice, oatmeal, soy milk, raisins, apple sauce, coffee/tea*;
Snacks during the day's drive: granola bar, mixed nuts, PB crackers;
Dinner: V8 juice; soup*, brown rice*, salmon (Donner gets ¾), small bottle of wine, chocolate
The items marked with an * are packed separately while the other 12 items are squeezed into 8x6x4 boxes and stored in a large container on the roof rack. I just have to climb up the ladder to the roof rack, open the container and reach into it, and -voila- my dinner is delivered. Except for breakfast, which I always eat in camp, and the day’s snacks -on the road or in camp- the other items are for when I am in a camp for a few days or did not have time to stop on the road to pick up something for dinner along with my daily supply of fresh fruit, vegetables and salad. I usually re-stock the boxes every five days or so to avoid having to go through the time-consuming task of replenishing all 12 boxes at once and to make sure I always have five days’ food for emergency bivouacs.
Unfortunately, when I am in campsites where there are bears or racoons, I have to take down all of my food boxes from the roof rack and store them in food lockers. I have already experienced several times pesky racoons climbing up the Defender and helping themselves to my goods, as well as a big hungry bear in Lake Tahoe who tried to do the same before I chased him or her away.
(When I am in camps known to have racoons, I lay out one of my tarps from the roof rack over windshield and then the hood of the Defender and put several of my dog's aluminum food bowls on the tarp leaning against the roof rack. When the racoons start climbing up the tarp-covered windshield, they pull the bowls down and run like hell to get out of there. As for the bears, I sleep with my whistle around my neck and bear spray nearby. Thirteen-year old Erde slept right through the Lake Tahoe bear incident in 2014, but I expect Donner to be more alert.)
Unfortunately, when I am in campsites where there are bears or racoons, I have to take down all of my food boxes from the roof rack and store them in food lockers. I have already experienced several times pesky racoons climbing up the Defender and helping themselves to my goods, as well as a big hungry bear in Lake Tahoe who tried to do the same before I chased him or her away.
(When I am in camps known to have racoons, I lay out one of my tarps from the roof rack over windshield and then the hood of the Defender and put several of my dog's aluminum food bowls on the tarp leaning against the roof rack. When the racoons start climbing up the tarp-covered windshield, they pull the bowls down and run like hell to get out of there. As for the bears, I sleep with my whistle around my neck and bear spray nearby. Thirteen-year old Erde slept right through the Lake Tahoe bear incident in 2014, but I expect Donner to be more alert.)
A photo of all of the stuff I now need to pack into individual boxes (one shown in photo) is shown below.
Donner has his own food containers, although he usually will end up eating some of my good stuff, although his definition of good stuff is broader than mine. That is one of the reasons I lose about 25 pounds on these trips and he gains weight.
Two more things of note happened today.
First, I found my misplaced set of extra car keys. What a relief. I knew they had to be somewhere in my home and they were. They were in the shopping bag with the small bottles of wine in it that I bought two weeks ago. Apparently, I must have had them in my hand when I went to carry the bag up to my apartment and dropped them in the bag to be retrieved when I unpacked the pack, which I just did today. I have too much on my mind.
Second, every time I go to drive the Defender, I turn on the headlights to make sure they are both working. This morning, they were not working, neither the low beams nor the high beams. But the flasher beams were working, which told me the lamps were good. I drove the Defender into Dean’s (my mechanic) who believes it is the switch for the lights. Let’s hope that’s all it is. No headlights for sure would be show stopper for this trip if not me. Dean ordered a new switch today and it should be in tomorrow. All I can say is that thank goodness I did not get on the road last Sunday as originally planned. That would have been a three-day layover somewhere in Illinois, if not six with the weekend coming up. So far, that’s the horn and the headlights going out in one week’s time, and the trip has not started. What else can go wrong?
ED
