I am at that stage of PPP (Planning, Preparing and Packing) where my home is beginning to resemble a thrift store or, worse, the home of a hoarder. Containers and things are beginning to come out of storage and clutter up my place, at the same time as things from my soon-to-be-former life are still where I left them. Some time today, I will put away the latter and set up as many as 20 stuff stations around the home, each station representing one container or another where I will gather all the stuff to go into those containers. The stations will be marked with a sign of one sort or another. Everything I plan to take with me will be tossed on those stations. This way, when I go to leave, I will not leave anything behind unless I decide to do so, and my home will return to its normal condition of being organized and everything in its place.
I ordered my rented satellite phone today, which is a sign that I am getting close to setting off. How close has yet to be determined. It will cost be $450 for six weeks and 60 minutes, and $35 a week after that, as well as $1.99 for each minutes over 60. On all my trips, I used the phone for an emergency only once, on the ALCAN in 2016. But the value in the sat phone is not its use in emergencies. Its real value is in knowing that I have it in case an emergency does arise and, therefore, it gives me license to go places I would not go without it.
In addition to the sat phone, I will have my cell phone, my iPad, and a GPS. What’s hard for me to realize today is that back on OTR-1 with Sonntag back in 2000, I had none of those things. I would stop off at town libraries during that trip to send of check email or call into my home phone and change my voice mail announcement message so people would know where I was. My, how things have changed.
I was hoping I escaped unscathed from that spill I took on the DVD last week, but I did not. My knee is acting up a bit, but nothing I foresee that will delay or cancel the trip.
Donner suspects something is up. The more containers that get pulled and scatted around, the closer he stays by me when I am home. He is probably concerned that I will walk out the door without him. Yes, like I am going to leave him behind. To ally his concerns, I will add his name to the top of my to take list. He has already test out his new custom-bed in the front passenger seat of my Defender and seems to like it. He does not, however, like the new cage system I devised for the rear window panel in the Defender. But I am sure he has a devised a way to break through that, just as he broke out of earlier systems I devised six times. Once, just before the Defender broke down in 2016 four days into the journey in New Brunswick, he broke out, but misjudged the best spot to do so and ended up getting is head caught between the rungs of my stainless steel ladder to the roof rack on the rear of the Defender.
Time to get to my to-do list.
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