I am excited to bring you today’s blog as there is only three days left until my first trip of the year! I leave on Saturday to fly to Amman in Jordan and on Sunday will start a trek through Wadi Rum, wild camping at night, finishing in Petra next Friday. For any would-be burglars: don’t be tempted to visit while I’m away – I have a house-sitter (as someone needs to look after my beautiful Hamish!).
At the weekend I did a practice pack, as evidenced in today’s image. My brother in law always laughs when I say I am practice-packing as he can’t understand why someone would need to do this! However the type of trips I go on require a backpack and various pieces of essential gear and I’m always on a quest to get my bag as light as possible.
While I will be visiting the desert, Jordan can be fairly chilly at night and in March the temperature can get down to zero degrees. I really wanted to get a new sleeping bag but ran out of time to properly explore all the options so I’m taking the one I already have, which is a 3-season and packs down pretty small. It weighs 1,500g, at some point I’d like to find one around 1,000g – any suggestions welcome! After some detailed research I did buy a new mat – a Thermarest NeoAir XLite NXT – pretty expensive but only 370g! I’m hopeful for a comfortable night’s sleep, along with my Thermarest travel pillow which was also highly rated, so 🤞
Now that I have done my practice pack, I need to unpack everything and see what I can lose. My main rucksack is a bit heavier than I’d like, and even though it will be transported for me each day (I just need to carry the small backpack) I will still need to get it there and back and don’t want to pull any muscles! Some tough decisions need to be made, especially as since the weekend I’ve added to the pile rather than removed! LOL
I will probably be “off comms”, as one of my colleagues would say, next week as there is unlikely to be Wi-Fi in the desert. In asking Google about the Wi-Fi situation I came across a list of poisonous snakes and scorpions that live in Wadi Rum, as well as a spider that has a leg span of 5.5 inches!! O dear!! Now I’m getting a bit nervous. Anyway, what I wanted to say is that if you would like to read about some of my other intrepid travels while I’m incommunicado head on over to my website: https://lizmooney.net/#stories
Elizabeth Mooney 