The Periphery of the Mind

So, we now have tent, backpacks, and sleeping bags.

We picked up a couple of Sleepcell bags at Sam's Club last week. They're big, heavy, hard to repack (although the Professor knows what she's doing, so I let her), and didn't have a way to attach to our backpacks. This weekend we travelled all over NWA looking for better bags, and found some smaller, lighter bags at the Sportsman's Warehouse in Rogers. Now, while the Sportsman's is a nice store for what it is (namely, a wanna-be Bass Pro Shop), the backpacks we got there were junk. We took them back, and the Professor snagged some packs of compression straps. Looped the straps through some holders in the bottom of the backpacks, and we had the perfect location for our sleeping bags.

For what it's worth, I'd initially been wanting this model for myself, but while it's cheaper and rated to a lower temperature, the Sleepcells we got have better ventilation and can probably handle a better and more realistic range of temperatures.

Next up is probably a camelback water bottle, a first aid kit, hiking poles, and food-related gear. There's still more to get, but those are hopefully going to be our biggest and heaviest purchases left.

Labels: hiking