On a sunny day in Invercargill, we started doing a little prepping for our upcoming journey. First, a walk to the center of town.
Remember the canal from yesterday? We had to cross it to get to the CBD. It's even prettier in bright daylight.
Oh yeah, and of course we needed to visit the local craft brewery. In actuality, the Invercargill Brewery was the best one we've been to in all of New Zealand. Solid beers, good selection, and the guy who was helping us buy a few bottles for dinner definitely gave us quite a bit of free beer.
Next, shopping for food. We planned on staying out in the bush for at least a week, so that requires a lot of stocking up. We tried a small Asian market first, to try and get a bit of variety (you can only eat oats and granola bars so much before you get sick of it.
We didn't buy these (chock full of MSG) and I'm not even sure what they are, but the look on the guys face almost made me want to get them anyway.
In any case, we went to the boring old grocery store, and bought a good 20 pounds of food. Including some flour. I've been wanting to try making hard tack for a while. My next door neighbor in Texas, Phil, is a Civil War re-enactor, and makes it for his various campaigns. It's pretty simple: Flour, salt, water, and oil if you're feeling fancy. Bake for half an hour, then flip and bake again. With no oil, these biscuit like things will stay good for years. With some oil, for weeks.
Sheet one, about to go in the oven.
Sheet one, coming out.
And here's sheet two. I used a whole lot of sauteed onion in these to make them a bit more palatable. I didn't really need food to last a really long time; we were only out a week. It was more that bread gets squashed in your pack, wraps/tortillas get dry and usually break, and hardier loaves of bread were expensive. For this, $2 NZ got us around 3 pounds of hard tack for the trip. Combined with some cheese, peanut butter, or sausage, and that's a lot of high calorie lunches.
This was only Saturday, we still had two days to go.
Tomorrow, a practice walk.
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