Douglas E. Berry

All righty! I've weighed all the fluids that will be going in Tramp Cripwire, and it comes out to 147.28lbs/66.8kg. Our fluids weigh more than I do.

Now, all that weight is on a one-way trip. The bulk of it is beer and vodka for our camp dues. The beer alone comes in at over 75lbs! We'll be drinking the rest of it ourselves.

Here's the issue. To balance the load in the trailer and the truck, I'm going to have to move about 74lbs/33.6kg from the truck to the trailer. I do have an easy out here. We always fill our three 7-gallon water cans, and never use all of it. If we end up with a full water jug, that will be about 60lbs/27.2kg, which should be enough to even the load out, considering the truck will have less weight after we eat all our food.

I still need to weigh the boxes and the propane tank, as those are the really heavy objects to be loaded, but right now I'm happy with my load plan. The Clothing Box, my bike, and our tools go in the trailer, and everything else in the truck.

If I'm missing something here, please enlighten me.

I seriously missed my calling. Had I ever had a shot at West Point (ha) I would have ended up in Supply or Transportation. Because I obsessively organize things. Today was a good example.

Kirsten had the brilliant idea of picking two longer versions of the black box/yellow lid containers we already use for Burning Man to hold our solar panels and the bag holding all the shade structure gear. I had the equally brilliant idea of using excess space in those boxes to consolidate crap from the two (actually three, but more about that later) standard boxes we already had loaded.

With a little fiddling, we turned one box into the complete, and all the kitchen gear kitchen box, holding the camp stove, our spice rack, and all the pots and pans and kitchen tools plus the bad holding all our freeze-dried camp food. We still have a tone of biscuits and gravy pouches, if anyone wants one. Or four.

That being done, it was easy to pack almost all the remaining gear into the box with the solar panels - dubbed the Sun Box by Kirsten - and the shade structure box - now the Moon Box, and I asked for a Lunar Moon rune to be drawn - with some space to spare. The nice thing is our vamp build plan, also written by yours truly, has the shade structure and solar panels being high on the list, and they are both at the top of their respective boxes.

We also decided that a few things that would be riding in the trailer should go to the trailer now. Our three 7-gallon water jugs were the big item here. Our two 5-gallon gas cans are now sitting in an empty, lidless box. The rule is that gas containers need to be in a "trap" and elevated from the ground. We have that covered.

There are still a few loose items that don't fit in the boxes. Our cam chairs, the propane cannister, the camp kitchen itself and the table. But they fit nicely in the spaces between the containers and our Coleman cooler.

While there's still a lot to work on, we can say that everything on that pallet is ready to be loaded onto Darby. What's left is consumables, clothing, and the contents of a box we dropped in back of the apartment and forgot was there. Ah, well. It's not much, and we can inventory it so when we do this the week before departure, we'll know exactly where everything goes. I'm too fried to update the packing list today, I'll do it tomorrow.

And I found my Yugoslavian greatcoat! A trip to the dry cleaner is in order.

Today also marked my first day wearing my kilt! Apologies for the blinding white legs.