Packing is a befuddling and exhausting process. Here poor Steve sits with a red nose on our "bed" on the floor (concrete's not all that soft, it turns out), where we slept for maybe 4 hours the last couple nights. That's Dayquil in the front left, and the Diet Coke box is our trashcan for the multitude of tissues we were going through. We had both gotten seriously sick, probably just from trying to get ready to hit the trail. Fortunately, we had help — Steve's brother, Greg, drove out from Michigan to help load the crates. He and Steve worked the boxes in like a 3-D jigsaw puzzle while I finished packing the dishes, scrubbing down the apartment, and other last-minute things. Both their backs gave out in the process, even after they discovered wheeled luggage carts make transporting boxes easier. It was a rainy and cold late November, and we mostly worked in the middle of the night to keep the neighborhood kids from vandalizing the crates or picking the locks (such sweet kidlets — we trusted them so after seeing their handiwork on apartment-complex signs and our car). Anyway, we would have been in serious trouble without Greg, so we're exceedingly grateful for his help, for which all he got was our old TV/VCR combo that sometimes works.
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