Te Araroa

Te Araroa Preparation

After getting to Great Nanna’s house, one of the first things we did was go open all the mail that we’d been getting sent to her house.

This is all the stuff that she’d been getting in the mail and sticking in the back-room for us. No wonder she was threatening to start charging us storage fees!

We’ve been buying most of our stuff online as it is a LOT cheaper. And when you’re trying to set up seven people for a five-month hike, cheap is good.

We knew that we’d make some mistakes getting things online and not being able to see them first. One of which was our sleeping bags.

They took up a lot more space than advertised and we can barely get them into our packs. Luckily Mum and I are pretty good sewers, so we’re going to cut them down into mummy-shaped bags. None of us are very tall, so we can take a good bit of the height off. I’ll be doing a post on downsizing your sleeping bag.

It was a bit tricky keeping track of what we had and hadn’t bought so I wrote a list. I love having lists to cross off.

It’s not the prettiest and it’s had a hard life. But, it does the job. Pink highlighter means bought and scribbled out with black pen means received.

After looking up gaiters, I found out that everyone seemed to love Dirty Girl Gaiters. On the site they only cost $23 but as anyone who has ever tried to buy something online from Australia, it costs a whole lot more for us, in this instance about $45 a pair.

So, I’ve been sewing gaiters out of a pair of mum’s old running tights and a chunk of dance fabric from the op-shop! I’ll write a post about it once I’ve perfected my design.

One of my sisters drew us up a countdown. Now there’s barely any days left!

We’ve also got our plane tickets to Auckland, Skybus tickets to Auckland Central, Intercity bus tickets to Kerikeri and a lift to Cape Reinga.

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