The march is grueling. The walking is easy.

The march is grueling. The walking is easy.  Walking is relief from the march.  Oh precious relief.

It was just announced that breakfast will be from 5:30 to 6:00.  If I don't get breakfast and make a sandwich by 6:00 AM, I'm out of luck.  Why so early?  This means that the earliest marchers want to be on the road by 6:30?  Why? The low tonight will be 35 degrees.  The morning will be miserable.

We ran out of water this evening.  We had no warning. We have no ice in any of our ice chests, and the refrigerator, which we've had since Parker, Arizona, has never been plugged into the electricity it requires. Monitoring quantities of food, propane, gasoline, water and ice are explicitly the responsibilities of the Logistics Coordinator, one of our paid staff persons.  I have been an advocate for her and her position.  I wrote her job description and advocated for hiring a person to carry these responsibilities, and now she is falling down on the job.

I'm going to take over some of her responsibilities, make them my own job, and remove those elements from her job description.

We are hosted last night and tonight by a generous couple who have a beautiful home and giant shop on a few acres of land between Snowflake and Concho, AZ.  They are completely off grid, using two wind generators and a solar array to charge a giant battery bank to power their place.  They've asked us to minimize power and water use, but we ran the batteries so low they had to run their gasoline burning generator to recharge the batteries, and then we have to ask them if we can run their pump long enough to pull 380 gallons of water.  They're generous.  They tell us to go ahead, and if necessary they'll fire up the generator again.

We ate dinner with our hands tonight, because the chef decided we should eat with tiny pieces of pita bread rather than with spoons and forks.  We don't have any means of easily washing our hands, so we all dove into the food with whatever we might have handled today in the mix.  I like forks.

There are 40 more issues that frustrate me and drive me up the wall.  There is only one urge more powerful than wanting to disconnect the eco-commode trailer from my truck and drive back to Oregon; that is to walk with Steve tomorrow - the full 21 miles.

Gotta gather up electrical equipment and load my truck tonight so I can start walking at a ridiculously early hour tomorrow.

...but I could be back in Oregon before you read this.