This Makes No Sense At All

heading towards Donahue Pass approaching Glen Pass  Every once in a while we meet some young men on the trail - 30ish, and they go on and on about how great it is that we are out on the trail. We have figured out that they think we are old and thus a novelty. We thought we were just other hikers, participating in what we sometimes look at as an extreme sport. Hiking and backpacking are one of the few areas where I can talk the usual trail topics, gear, food, weather, and feel like any other hiker. I guess we will have to live with being categorized by a few. At 72 and 77, we may be getting past middle age. viewing Rae Lakes We see our older friends beginning to be impacted by aging, so that threat is always out there. As a consequence, each of our trips over the last few years is an intentional pushing of our personal envelope. How else do we find our limits? This does lead to making mid trip changes to adapt to the circumstances. For the most part, age seems to be a ...

We've just been doing training hikes lately, primarily on city streets. Our goal is two  or three long hikes a week. (at least 10 miles). We discovered that Semifreddi's bakery is 5 plus miles from our house, depending on route, so we make the journey there, carrying our packs, have a pastry, buy a sandwich for the trip back, and return home. Voila! 10 miles. They give out these little cards, to be stamped once for each visit. Twelve spots on the card. When it is full, we get a free coffee. At this point we are about half way through our 3rd card, representing about 300 miles walking to Semifreddi's. To get to the blog topic, we've also been giving some video presentations around the area, some on Patagonia, and some on the Camino. During setup, for my own entertainment, and to test the laptop and digital projector setup, I run some short videos that I've put out to Youtube. After the presentation I always get a couple of questions about the projection software an...

You may have wondered about my blog name "This Makes No Sense At All". It came about because one of the things we have always loved about hiking is the consistently wonderful community of hikers, when we meet them on the trail. No matter what their circumstances in the real world, on the trail they are without exception, friendly and go out of their way to be helpful. When we got more interested in long distance hiking, and I started following the related hiking online forums, I discovered that this spirit prevailed, but that there was also more than expected angry divisive commentary. It was this that made no sense at all. I could not match it with the people I met on the trail. Last fall when we noticed that our sales of Camino Chronicle abruptly dropped by two thirds, we did some checking and saw that a couple had bought a copy from Amazon, and then posted two very negative one star reviews. Since we didn't have a lot of reviews to begin with, that had a drastic...

About a two years ago I posted on the process of putting our first two books on Kindle - converting-our-books-to-kindle-work-in.html . That involved getting a text file from the original page making software (Pagemaker and Indesign), and putting that text into a Word file just to get Word's ability to put out an html file. Getting the initial text was messy as I had the original Indesign CS. The easiest way to get text out of it was open it in Story Editor and cut and paste that text into Word. Then I would save as filtered web page to get html. The resulting html was run into Mobipocket Creator, and the file out of Mobipocket Creator was one I could load directly onto my Kindle, and when satisfied, send to Amazon. Once the initial html file was created, I never went back to Word. Corrections were made by editing the html file with Notepad++. Mobipocket Creator also built the initial versions of the toc.ncx file and the contents.opf file. The toc file creates the little tab bar a...

Our hiking has suffered the last few months, as we first cautiously watched for success of Susan's new medication, and then focused every waking minute on getting Patagonia Chronicle: Walking to Torres del Paine out the door. It finally got up on Amazon a week or so ago, and we have fifty-some on hand. Much nicer than the earlier books where we would have about 3500 books arrive at the door and need to find a place to stash them in our tiny house. I'm very proud of Susan and of what she has produced: The book is available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. It can be ordered from your local bookseller from Ingram. ISBN 978-0-936034-04-1 The description as it appears in various book catalogs: Patagonia Chronicle: On Foot in Torres del Paine enables readers to gain a sense of the rewards and challenges of travel south of the 40 th parallel in Chile and Argentina — Patagonia. Through journal entries, interviews, historic documents, and essays on subjects unique to t...

Plan A was Geneva to Le Puy - 19 walking days, a fairly leisurely schedule we thought. We flew into Geneva via London. Barely squeaked by on transfer time in London. Heathrow ran us out of our international flight, through immigration, out to the main area, and back through full security. At least the bag with our hiking poles was checked through to the final destination. Geneva airport has a free ticket good for 80 minutes of public transport, bus or train, so we got the train, got off at station Cornavin and walked about six blocks north east to Geneva City Hostel. Spartan but clean 2 person room, and pastry and coffee available on the corner the next morning by 7am. I'd carefully traced the GR65 route through Geneva on my gps map software before leaving home, as well as loading someone's gps track of the entire route to Le Puy, so wasn't concerned about navigating through Geneva. Fired up the gps, saw the city and streets with no problem, but absolutely no trace ...

Standing Desk I was doing some mundane household task the other day, stomping, bending over, repeating the process. Suddenly this acute pain at the base of my spine told me that I shouldn't have done that. Multidays with vitamin I (ibuprofen) have vastly improved the situation. Fortunately, walking only makes things better so my hiking days are not a problem. What does not help is sitting at the computer all day. I've sometimes thought about the health aspects of a desk where I stood, rather than sat, but never acted on it. Once more those thoughts came up. This time I decided I had materials on hand that would allow me to do a test. Boxes of books got the monitor and keyboard up to standing height, and a multi level in-out basket got the mouse up. I was good to go.  After a couple of days of use, my back was normal enough to resume sitting, and I had learned a couple of things about using a standing desk. 1. You need more than just the monitor, keyboard, etc. r...