trek diaries: Ma & Pa training #2

Saturday afternoon, 4 weeks before trek. All the Ma&Pa pairs (MPs) and the stake leadership meet on site. Our trek is along 21 miles of an unpaved gravel & dirt rail trail in New Hampshire, with culvert crossings under several roads. We practiced loading a wagon and securing it on the top with tarps and rope. The main question was, can we get 12 of the luggage buckets, 12 sleeping bags and pillows, and the other gear all on one wagon and keep it from being too tall to fit through the culverts? This was definitely a group project. In the real trek this task will fall to the Big Brother/Big Sister pair (BB-BS) each of the 3 mornings. The handcart is beautiful - really a nice piece of construction, well balanced and solid. I have no idea how much it weighs unloaded or loaded, but it rolls very smoothly and with little effort over level ground. We took turns pulling/pushing it about a mile, to a private-land campsite we'll use for one of our overnights, and there the food team prepared one of the dinners to try it out, and we practiced running a family devotional and had a briefing about the schedule.

This was helpful in numerous ways: to get acquainted with the other MPs who are from throughout the stake and don't necessarily know one another (and who will be too occupied during trek with their various family duties to see much of each other); to see the wagon, trail, and setting all come together (in good weather); and to get ideas about what other things we might need to bring or think about. (I.e. rope, more rope, bungees - ok, not historically accurate, but I bet they'll come in handy). My husband and I got the idea to sew a "toolbelt" pouch with pockets to tie on to the front or back of the wagon to have place to stash waterbottles, flashlights, bug spray or whatever. That's my project this week, so I'll post a photo when it's done.

This week the stake had a big youth activity to make individual leather-bound journals to take on trek and to get their buckets and decorate them (I had to miss the activity, but if anyone from my stake is a reader, please comment & share how it went). Those will be dropped off a couple of days before the trek begins, fully packed, so that the luggage all gets transported up to the trail before youth conference starts - hopefully smoothing the logistics of Day 1, since all we will have to transport is kids, and not all their stuff too. Excitement is definitely building!