Six weeks doesn’t seem like a very long time yet to go.

I have a lot of little details yet to wrap up before I’m ready to hit the Trail. Like pulling together a first aid kit. Or getting a really small toothpaste tube to take along. Or nailing down just where I think I might “re-supply” (that is, get the next few days’ worth of food either by mail or at a grocery store).

That last one is actually not a little detail.

Lots of people hike this Trail with little or no planning. At least they start that way. I don’t know what the stats are on whether detailed planners are more likely to finish the whole hike. But I do believe that the flexible schedulers are more likely to. And by nature I’m a scheduler.

So, for example, I have been trying to chart out how far I think I will get by this or that date, in order to be able to tell family and friends when I will be in their region. My approach, of course, is to go to the books. I pulled some of the hiker narratives off my shelves and built a spreadsheet of where they were when, adjusting their start date to match mine. Did that with 4 different hikers. Turns out they took widely varying amounts of time to complete their hikes: from 111 days to 147 days.

Then I came across a chart of post offices one hiker used, with the days he was able to get to each one. Great spreadsheet, too, because it also showed how many miles between these food drops, how many days of meals each box needed to contain, and how many miles per day it would take to get to that post office. Best part for me is that after charting it out, I saw he took 152 days, which is about what I’ve been thinking I will be aiming for: just about 5 months, but leaving myself a month of leeway. Excellent!

Then this guy’s spreadsheet also had a formula in it to recalculate the days and dates for each stop, based on start date. I changed the date to 13 April, and voila!, there are the dates I might be at those locations.

Now the flexibility part: fully one third of the calculated target dates are on Sundays. And post offices aren’t open on Sundays (a lot of these small post offices don’t have much in the way of Saturday hours, either). So be flexible: a) hike faster or slower in order to start hitting the post offices during the week; b) switch to other options like having packages sent to hostels or other hiker-friendly businesses; c) aim to resupply more at grocery stores than through the mail; d) make whatever adjustments it takes.

I have to, in other words, schedule in some spontaneity!

And I have 6 weeks from today to do it.