Planning a Hiking Vacation: Family Edition

Last year's vacation was a first for us - we went on a hiking vacation with my family. Granted we're an older bunch with the youngest at 24 and we've vacationed with family before, but not like this. We never had to test our nerves together after miles of heat, blisters, and uphill and I was nervous. But I'm a planner at heart and I issued instructions as I tend to do with most things to help make it a better trip.

1) I was a drill sergeant about training
I brought up hiking training in every conversation. I would ask them how many miles they are walking each day, how many or how tall were the hills, and how winded they felt afterwards. I would make comparisons to landmarks they know ("Hiking up Highline trail will be like going up Kennesaw Mountain 3 times in a row.") so they could hopefully train more.  I started the training conversation before we even booked the flights. I didn't want anyone unprepared.

Trail signs are better with funny faces.

2) I assigned gear lists
I'm a list keeper. When we booked this trip, I sent them my copy of lists from previous hiking trips to show them the gear they would need. Good news is they didn't have to buy a lot more, but I knew before I sent the the lists what they were missing. I made sure everyone had their own pack and water. We addressed clothing to bring like jackets, convertible pants, HATS! For the love of god always hike with a hat! There was even a first-aid briefing so at least each pair of hikers had basic items for blister care.

We also discovered we are a family who loves puzzles.

3) I listened to their needs
After the first hike, I learned a lot. I hurried us on a 5 mile hike in mid-afternoon in the crowds and heat. We did not perform well. My husband's pace was too fast for the group, my mom liked to break at different points than me, and my sister wanted lots of photos. At the end of the hike we were exhausted in more than one way and it was just day one. I was worried the entire vacation was going to already be a bust.

So at dinner time, we talked it over. I asked how they felt on the hike and what they wanted to change. When we hiked as a family again on Day 3, we made lots of changes. I became line leader as my pace was the right balance. I made sure to stop at the bottom and top of hills, instead of just the top like I was use to.  We communicated more about stopping for photos or changing pace. It was a much better hike!


Hiking with family presents a new set of challenges, but it was rewarding to share the memories together after the trip. Don't get a few bumps prevent you from the same!

Expanding Foam and You: Creating a Mage Staff with Expanding Foam

Do you sense a theme with my latest cosplay posts? That would be prop making. I like to pick one things I want to learn that year and commit to making cosplays that help me learn it. Last year, it was props so I can now share what I have learned with the masses!

My big prop last year (literally!) was a mage's staff. After lots of research, the best material choice for me to follow my three tenets of prop making was going to be expanding foam. Two tutorials sold me on the idea:

• Kamui Cosplay, a goddess of prop making
• MyCuteBow's Etwahl Making

Each project is different so while these served as good guides for me, I still ran into unique issues I had to battle. 

I nailed the first step to create my prop core and outline. 

I got a wood pole from Home Depot to serve as the core for the staff and drew a lot on a piece of craft foam until I found the approximate size and shape of the staff head. I would constantly hold the piece up to myself in a mirror to ensure I liked the scale. (Note: There are a lot of tutorials about using a lot of math to scale props online. At the end of the day, I go with what looks right on me.)

 I went outside with a tarp to start step 2-- attaching foam to my core. 

Expanding foam should be handled with care. Lay down a tarp to protect surfaces and be sure to wear at gloves to protect your skin. Outside application is best for large amounts because you will want the ventilation. 

Look Ma! I even made some guides to 1) help give the foam something to attach to and 2) give me a stopping point in carving.

 From my handy dandy sketch, I knew I wanted the staff to have an approximately two inch diameter. I cut and hot glued on foam pieces that are two inches. When carving, if I saw green I would know I have gone far enough. 

You'll see most people use cardboard in other tutorials. I chose craft foam because it was easier for me to see and glue to my core. I was cutting a lot of pieces out and craft foam is way easier for that than cardboard. 

The expanding foam quickly rebelled against me. 

You see, it is very sticky when it meets cloth or plastic. It does not like to stick to itself after a certain point. The foam would start to build, then slide off the pole as it settled. After one bottle of foam, I was left with a half-covered mess of a staff. 

The solution was more cowbell and more guides. I hot glued craft foam everywhere to create 'V' channels the the foam could rest in.

Now I'm guessing you could also show more patience than me and wait for a smaller amount of foam to dry before applying the next.  However, this method totally worked. Sometimes I would jam a piece of craft foam between hunks of expanding foam - no glue needed. 

It still took several layers and some patience to create the necessary bulk on the staff.

The good thing about bright green guides is I knew to cover the staff until they were not visible. If I could see them or guess where they are, I would add more foam. 

It took between 3-4 bottles of foam to create the staff. Or rather the hunk of foam that would become the staff.  Next post will be about the carving and covering process!

Part II is live! Click here to ead the next steps.

Creating a vacation hiking schedule

It's no secret that we like to plan vacations around hiking. My idea of relaxation is eating lunch on top of a mountain.  My planning approach for a vacation hike is different from my local day hike approach. I'm less familiar with the terrain and weather patterns, I'm more likely to do hikes in less than ideal conditions, and I'm not taking the next day off to recover with video games. So what am I looking for in my hiking vacation planning? This.

1) Write down twice as many hikes as you want to do.
Always list more hikes than you think you can do in a day. One guidebook's strenuous is another book's moderate. I never want to it to be mid-day and I'm still ready to hike but have no clue where to go. Each day of my vacation schedule lists one to two 'must-do' trails and then one to two optional trails depending on the day's condition and my condition.

Goats don't close trails thank god!

This is also helpful if one of your trails is closed due to weather or animal activity.


2) Plan hiking days in pairs
For every day of strenuous hiking, match it with a day of easy hiking. I recognize that I struggle to hike 18 miles with 4,000 ft elevation two days in a row. So if day one is hiking Half Dome, day two is going to the Tuolumne Meadows (true story). This gives me time to recover and take on another mountain on day three.

Up in the clouds day 1...

...down in the meadows day 2. Our legs thanked us.

3) Don't plan a day
My favorite vacation day is catch-up day. This day is left blank at the end of the trip for us to pick up any trail we choose. Sometimes it's a trail suggestion from a ranger or a fellow hiker on the trail. If we got rained out on an earlier day, then we use catch-up day to get in that hike. Mother nature never cooperates 100% of the time. As a result, I never plan 100% of the time so we can still get it all in. Remember all those extra trails you wrote down in step 1? Here's your chance to visit some of the favorites that got left behind.

Eagle View trail may not be popular,but it sure is beautiful. 

Gearing up for abroad - New Year, New Resolutions

At the start of last year, I swore I was going to blog again. Blog more! Blog often! But last year's miss is this year's opportunity. So with a new year, I'm trying to kick my butt into gear again. This time, I'll start with a hiking post about the challenges of going abroad.

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We love to make our vacations all about hiking. Spending seven days in a national park is easy planning. My car is my base camp, I only wear hiking clothes all trip, and I have access to laundry. For our trip to Japan, we wanted to make it all about food and only hike a few days. In lieu of suitcases, we used our multi-day packs. Translation: space was a rationed commodity.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized two facts:

• I did not want to carry Fuji hiking gear for more than the day I needed it
• I could not be the only person who wants to hike Fuji and doesn't have gear

The solution? Rent it! When I started looking at this route, I found there were online sites devoted to rental gear just for hiking Fuji. We could choose what we needed and have it sent to our hotel. I got us jackets (two layers), hiking boots, gloves, gators, hiking poles, and rain pants. You could have rented even more, if needed. We used our own base layers, socks,and headlights for the trip. 

Ricky sporting his rental jacket and gloves. So warm!

Our backpacks thanked us for the saved weight and space.  We were thankful to have gear made for the mountain. At home in Georgia, we have gear for rain and gear for cold but not gear for rain AND cold. From 6th to 8th station, the rain went from a sprinkle to a downpour. Visibility dropped drastically along with the temperature. The gear we rented was airtight. Not a drop got in and I never felt uncomfortably cold. 

We had two jackets - a fleece for warmth and an outer layer for rain.

Returning was just as easy. We threw everything in a pre-paid bag and dropped it off at a post office. Nothing to wash. No dirt in our bags. It was gone as magically as it had appeared.

After renting gators, I had to buy some when I got home!

The only difficult part was sizing. Americans tend to be larger than Japanese so we went with 'size O' on everything. Some items were on the tight side (pants), but it was better than nothing at all. 

So if your trip has you visiting a foreign country and hiking is only a part of your agenda, I highly encourage you looking at rental gear. The money spent was well worth the space saved!

Prop Planning - Making templates from thin air

Last year was a big step in cosplay for me: I made the leap into props. By leap, I really mean a toddler step. The important part was that I moved in that direction and I learned skills and confidence that will help me expand more this year.

My biggest fear with non-fabric work was the pattern. I'm not an artist, despite being surround by them in my family. The easy answer was to have my mom or sister make my template design, but I was set on creating it on my own. My challenge was making the star crest for Sailor Cosmos. (The staff will be another blog post.)

I tried to hand draw the wings, but I was never satisfied with the result. It looked awkward and not to scale. So I went back to my roots - I was always really good a tracing.

1) Load the image into Photoshop. On a budget? Gimp is free and works just as well.

2) Open a second layer and, using a black pencil tool, trace over the item. Zoom in as much as you want. No need to struggle! You can get as detailed with your trace as you want. When a line was missing, I made it up.

3) Trace all the patterns you want and you'll end up with a photo that looks like this:

Remember, this is TWO layers. That's really key and why paint will not work for this method.

4) Copy your tracing layer (Layer 2) to a new document. I made a separate file for each wing piece on a document that was set to 8.5x11 inches. This will help with the next step.

5) Scale your pieces. It's going to look blurry, but roll with it. I found it helpful to measure on myself how big I think I wanted to prop to look (4 inches high vs. 6 inches high) and would scale the image to match that size in the document. See why you want the document to be in inches and not in pixels?

My result looked like this:

6) Clean up your image. If I printed this out, it would be a hot mess for me to work with. I opened another layer and worked with a different color (red) to draw new lines. I was tracing my my tracing. I used the shift key to help draw series of straight lines over my pattern. All the while, I was turning layers on and off to check my progress. The final result was this:

7) Print it! Minor adjusts can be made by scaling your image in your print settings (print 100% to scale or 70% to scale). It's a faster adjustments then scaling your image and risk losing your pretty lines.

8) I placed the paper pattern over some craft foam and traced the lines very carefully with an x-acto knife to make a foam pattern I could use over and over!

(This is one with some paint trials on it)

The beauty of this method is

1) No real art skills required

2) Easy to scale

3) Easy to replicate

And that is how you can make a template from thin air. 

Back to Blogging & What's to come

Hello again!

After a year away from blogging, I realize how much I miss it. New year, new you can start at any point in the year, right? For some much needed creative release, I look forward to sharing my blog updates with you on hiking and cosplay.

The good thing about taking a year off is you have plenty of backlogged material to keep you active. The bar is set low (1-2 a month), but I hope to keep it alive an growing. Here's a preview of what's to come:

Hiking

Climbing Fuji! This contains multiple posts topics such as hiking in a foreign country, packing for abroad hikes, and how to prep for hard climbs.

Hiking in the snow - it may not be a big deal for many of you, but for a southern hiker it's an experience.  We did lots of hiking in the pacific northwest that I can't wait to share.

Cosplay

Dragon Con, or how to change into multiple cosplays over the course of too few days. Also, made a cardboard car!

Sailor Cosmos was my new cosplay of the year (I made a few others, but this was the big effort). I learned more about sewing and a lot about how to get started making prop pieces. Between this cosplay and the ones I'm working on for 2015, I'll have plenty to share. 

I look forward to sharing more in 2015!

Airplane Bento II

A year later, the airplane bento post remains my top hit. So when we went on vacation this summer, I knew I had to outdo myself. We had a 5 1/2 hour flight in the afternoon, so I "brought it" by increasing the size of the tupperwear container. I wanted to feature my favorite snacks and airplane purchases while adding some novel items in. It also helped that Target had a snack station where I could purchase smaller versions of tasty treats.

In this bento we have:

- 2 fun packs of peanut M&Ms
- Pretzel Crisps
- Pepperoni Stick
- Chocolate Chip Chewy Bar
- Individual Hummus
- Babel Cheese wheel