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

Backwoods Spaghetti

As we gear up for our summer trip, I've been practicing trail cooking at home. That way, we can try out the recipes before we're miles away from a kitchen. I try to do a full practice with the stove we have to make sure the recipe will work with our limited gear. Today I made spaghetti!

I LOVED this meal! It was easy and delicious! For the noodles, I broke them in half to fit in a snack ziplock. For the sauce, I went with a tomato paste base. 

Tomato Sauce:

- 2 tablespoon of tomato paste

Buy a can and divide the paste into an ice tray.  Freeze it and have paste for a long time. I would then use one cube for this recipe

- 1 teaspoon garlic powder

- 1 teaspoon dried basil

- 1 teaspoon dried oregano

- 1 vegetable bouillon cube

- pinch of red pepper flakes

As with any recipe, play with your seasoning and seasoning amounts to fit your taste. I wanted a simple recipe so I did all "1" measurements. 

Our cooking tools are really simple when we're on the trail. From left to right we have our stove with snowpeak pot, an xmug to eat it in, noodles in the ziploc bag, sauce in the tupperware, and the lid/sauce pan.  I grabbed all of the tools and ingredients and proceed to my front porch to cook. I like to worry the neighbors. 

Fill the pot with water and bring to a boil. Then drop in your noodles, lower your pot to a simmer (if you can, otherwise just take the pot off the flame for a bit), and throw a lid on it. Remember, noodles like a lot of water to move around in.

My cat was suspicious of the gas stove sounds...

Be sure to stir and check on your noodles on occasion. My lid kept coming off so I had to leave uncovered towards the end.

Drain what you can without losing the noodles and keep 1 cup of extra pasta water in the your mug. That way, you can add in water as you need to your sauce. Drop in the whole set of sauce seasonings and stir. Add water as needed to reach your desired consistency.

Enjoy!

Why every cosplay should have a professional photograph

You've labored and spent hours on creating your costume. It's like your own masterpiece when it's done! I recognize the amount of effort it takes to make those outfits, props and accessories that go into it so reward yourself with a professional photography session.

A professional photographer is going to be able to capture you in the moment of being your character, not you stressing to run back into the shot after hitting the timer. Not to mention, they're a professional! The skill these guys have with a camera is going to make you look even better.

Allow me to demonstrate my point. Here is a picture of me taken by my sister at Anime Weekend Atlanta in my first cosplay, Shura from Blue Exorcist with another cosplayer.

It's not perfect or the best Shura cosplay. Heck, I know I'm not built the same way as she is. The photo is good, but that's about it.

Now here's the same costume, same girl, but with a professional.

Quite a difference! If you're going to take the time to make a costume, spend the extra bucks to take photos to preserve your work. It's a great memento to look back on as you make your next costume!

* Professional photography taken by Pixlette Photography.