Sheri and I made it back from the West Coast Trail last night, and I got home from Victoria today. I have lots of cleaning up to do as my house is a mess from getting ready to leave. The trail was great, we hiked from Saturday August 20th to Saturday August 28th. We took almost a full gigs worth of pictures, which I will go through and post on a pictoral guide to the West Coast Trail later on.

I have most of my gear together for the West Coast Trail. I was concerned about the weight and feel of my pack. However, I found that it performed incredibly well at Cape Beale, and now, with much more food in it (but lighter clothing) the pack still handles well.

The first day will be the worst. I will be hiking with a full pack, and since we are leaving from Port Renfrew we will be tackling the hardest part of the trail first. Fortunately, the pack will become lighter as the trip goes on!

I have wanted to hike the West Coast Trail for a number of years, probably since the late 80’s in fact. Now I am worried that it has become too popular, and I expect that other than the total distance involved - and having a heavier pack - it will be a far easier hike than the misguided Cape Beale trek. At the very least, I will be able to say “yes” to people who have been asking me for years: “You are really outdoorsy, have you hiked the West Coast Trail?”

I am slowly updating pictures of Daisy my Schnorkie. She is a silly little 8 pound ball of fur. My mother is taking care of Daisy while I will be out hiking the West Coast Trail with Sheri. I hope to create a good archive of pictures of the West Coast Trail, as well as scan some of the maps of the hike, and include a gear list.

I installed DD-WRT on my Linksys WRT-54G last night, and I was quite impressed. I had been playing around with the basic fragments of OpenWRT and things like Asterisk on OpenWRT prior. The DD-WRT implementation is very slick. If you need a router, I highly reccomend the WRT-54G/S and DD-WRT. Nothing like having advanced routing features and a full SSH shell on an inexpensive wireless router!

I finished Snow Crash and The Future For Investors - both great audiobooks. I also finished The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham. It was good, but I understood much of it already from The Warren Buffett Way and Future for Investors. I would still reccomend it to people who have not read similiar books.

I have set up a temp directory for our pictures from Cape Beale. It is a massive collection of thumbnails from the Cape Beale hike. As I mentioned, I will create a write up with descriptions of the pictures and the hike, as well as some scanned maps showing the way, so to speak.

Sheri and I came back alive (surprisingly) from Cape Beale in one piece each. It was a great long weekend, and we got some fantastic pictures that I will be posting on here once I get the sizes reduced. I also plan on scanning some maps to show the areas we hiked.

I finished Catch-22, and it ended completely differently than I had expected. I also took a break from some of my other books, and started “The Future for Investors” by Jeremy J. Siegel and it is really good. I am over halfway done. For a book on economics it is quite entertaining.

I have also started listening to Snow Crash, which is a pulpy cyberpunk novel, and I find it quite enjoyable.