Last weekend Don and I both bought decent backpacks and had them properly fitted (recommend!).

Today we packed them full of stuff and took them on a test hike in the national park.

It was a glorious sparkling (hot) day and having packs that fit made such a difference to the experience. The route was around 10km (grade 4/5 difficulty) and though pretty tired we were not completely exhausted.

We have have dreams of eventually walking many European trails. I’m not sure how much practice we’ll need until we’ll be ready to handle multi-day hikes (quite a lot I imagine!), but I am excited to get to that point.