[at-l] Thanks for all of the watch advice...

[medusaj at aol.com (medusaj@aol.com)]

My take on the watch question:  any watch will do.  We picked up a six-dollar Walmart watch in Connecticut after realizing that our unfortunate habit of getting up, whether sleeping in tent or shelter, after eleven o'clock just wasn't going to get us to Katahdin on time.  Which just goes to show, despite all appearances to the contrary, that time does matter on the trail.  I was convinced upon setting out that I could rise with the sun and walk until dark and time would have no relevance, but that's just not true.
 
Did anyone else have the same experience?
 
Unfortunately, that watch was lost during our epic adventure working on a Christmas-tree farm in Maine this fall and now we have to buy a new one.  I'm thinking another six-dollar Wally world watch is a good bet.  We went with a digital watch with alarm function that also beeped on the hour, a nice function, IMHO, that allowed us to gauge time and mileage without ever having to actually look at the watch, which I tried not to do.  We also took off the band and pinned it to County's pack in order to save weight.  And I really didn't want to know time during the day, just when we needed to figure out how much time we had to get to the next shelter, or whatever.
 
Time is even more of a consideration on the PCT, where you're supposed to get up with the dawn, hike into the night, and siesta during the noon hours.  Yikes.  Hopefully having to get up at 5:30 for work these days will help us out, but I kind of doubt it.
 
Marzipan (and County)
 

> > Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 08:37:43 -0500
> > From: "Shelly Hale" <shellydhale@earthlink.net>
> > Subject: [at-l] Thanks for all of the watch advice...
> > To: "at-l@mailman. backcountry. net" <at-l@mailman.backcountry.net>
> > Message-ID: <E1DBCFN-0000SI-00@pop-a065c28.pas.sa.earthlink.net>
> > Content-Type: text/plain;     charset="US-ASCII"
> >
> > You guys/gals are the greatest!  I've got lots of ideas from
responses 
> on and
> > off list for a watch to wear while hiking.  I still
> > need to make up my mind, but I really appreciate the information 
> provided by
> > everyone.  I certainly was able to grow my list of
> > different ones to choose from.
> >
> >
> >
> > Tenacious Tanasi
> >
> >    (Shelly Hale)