[pct-l] success

[Virginia Owen <OWEN@TheAdvisoryGroup.com>]

Tom - you are right that most hikers are  weekend backpackers, if that, and
if a weekend is blown, it's no big deal. There's always next week. For a
vacation, the cost of a disrupted trip, both fiscal and emotional, can be
higher.  But for a thruhiker, the cost - both emotional and financial - can
be enormous.  

Suppose you quit your job (or in your case - train someone to manage your
business and let all your clients know that what you are doing so they
don't get upset at the change), give up your home, or arrange to rent it
out while you're gone, or you've had to save up enough to pay the mortgage
for 6-8 months while you aren't working, you put down a large deposit at a
storage facility to store your household furnishings, buy loads of gear
after spending months or years researching what you need, spend months
dehydrating foods to take with you and/or shopping for six months worth of
food and boxing it up, you spend more months training physically for the
hike, maybe spend years saving money, denying yourself ordinary expenses
because the thruhike has priority,  you've spent untold hours reading the
guidebooks, thinking about the hike, dreaming about the hike, talking about
the hike, you've dealt with the 1001 details that are involved in leaving
your ordinary life behind (what do you do about pets, insurance, cars,
bills, taxes, etc.) --- say you've totally disrupted your life in
preparation for the adventure of a lifetime - then you find out that it
isn't what you thought it would be.  

Or it was, maybe it was even better than you thought it would be, but
because of health, weather, finances, family etc., you have to go home
before you finish.  For most people, it's not just a matter of going back
next year to try  again, that would mean another total lifestyle
disruption. They would have to get a job and a place to live for less than
a year, and then give them up again. That's not all that easy. Either
physically, emotionally or financially.  So you have the choice, do I make
finishing the trail the priority in my life again, putting much of the rest
of my life on hold, or do I give up the dream I have treasured for so long?
 What will it mean to give up the dream?  Not finishing a thruhike is
nothing like having a bad weekend trip -  the cost (for some people at
least) can be so much higher. 

Ginny

* From the Pacific Crest Trail Email List |  http://www.backcountry.net   *

==============================================================================