If I were to Paddle the Mississippi Again
September/27/2007 10:58 PM Mississippi River
Overall, I think the trip went about as well as could
be expected. Every long journey gives you more
experience, and the Mississippi River trip was no
different. There's an old adage that "Good judgement
comes from experience, and good experience comes from
bad judgement." That would be me.
If we were to paddle the Mississippi again, there a few things that I'd consider doing differently. First off would be to have more of a cash cushion to work with. Jess and I were both in the middle of our PhD programs at the time, and were your typical broke grad students. Having a little more cash to fall back on would have taken some pressure off many decisions, like whether or not to get a motel room when we probably could have used the rest.
I would have treated this more like a backpacking trip and carried less junk. We didn't have a cooler or dutch oven, but there were certainly things that we could have cut out or combined. There's a simplicity to cutting out almost everything and going lean that I've grown to appreciate.
The canoe worked out fine, but was larger than necessary from the headwaters down to Bemidji. Bemidji State University's Outdoor Program Center rents smaller (pre-scratched) canoes that would have been more appropriate for that first stretch.
We'll definitely have better rain gear along for the next trip. Paddling-specific clothing, with tighter cuffs and better design would have been great to have as it rained for the better part of the first month. My rain pants were marginal to begin with, and they failed completely about two weeks into the trip.
I was trying to get a newspaper article out once a week, sending out dispatches largely from libraries along the way. Next time I'd stretch that interval to every other week, and either carry a laptop or PDA / folding keyboard combination. Technology is changing rapidly, and there are already several products on the market that would make ideal small expedition computers for writing, sending photos, and getting info on the fly. Flash memory has gotten so inexpensive that we would probably just carry a few memory cards for the entire trip instead of juggling one card and burning cd's along the way.
We needed to have a firm ending date in order to get back to school, and that was a stress inducer for the entire trip for me. Next time around, we'll finish when we finish, ending dates be damned.
That's about it. Most of these are fairly minor, but collectively had a large enough impact on the trip to affect decisions along the way. Long trips are often a crap shoot as to whether they'll be successful or not, but it doesn't hurt to stack the cards in your favor whenever possible
If we were to paddle the Mississippi again, there a few things that I'd consider doing differently. First off would be to have more of a cash cushion to work with. Jess and I were both in the middle of our PhD programs at the time, and were your typical broke grad students. Having a little more cash to fall back on would have taken some pressure off many decisions, like whether or not to get a motel room when we probably could have used the rest.
I would have treated this more like a backpacking trip and carried less junk. We didn't have a cooler or dutch oven, but there were certainly things that we could have cut out or combined. There's a simplicity to cutting out almost everything and going lean that I've grown to appreciate.
The canoe worked out fine, but was larger than necessary from the headwaters down to Bemidji. Bemidji State University's Outdoor Program Center rents smaller (pre-scratched) canoes that would have been more appropriate for that first stretch.
We'll definitely have better rain gear along for the next trip. Paddling-specific clothing, with tighter cuffs and better design would have been great to have as it rained for the better part of the first month. My rain pants were marginal to begin with, and they failed completely about two weeks into the trip.
I was trying to get a newspaper article out once a week, sending out dispatches largely from libraries along the way. Next time I'd stretch that interval to every other week, and either carry a laptop or PDA / folding keyboard combination. Technology is changing rapidly, and there are already several products on the market that would make ideal small expedition computers for writing, sending photos, and getting info on the fly. Flash memory has gotten so inexpensive that we would probably just carry a few memory cards for the entire trip instead of juggling one card and burning cd's along the way.
We needed to have a firm ending date in order to get back to school, and that was a stress inducer for the entire trip for me. Next time around, we'll finish when we finish, ending dates be damned.
That's about it. Most of these are fairly minor, but collectively had a large enough impact on the trip to affect decisions along the way. Long trips are often a crap shoot as to whether they'll be successful or not, but it doesn't hurt to stack the cards in your favor whenever possible
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