Back from Seattle
Well we’re back from our trip to Seattle in the US. We decided to go at the last minute simply because of the exchange rate with the pound being so strong (nearly $2 to the pound)! I decided to produce a spreadsheet prior to booking the flights to work out what the potential cost savings would be by buying the equipment we need for our South America trip in the US. It looked like most the cost of the trip would be covered so that’s what made up our minds.
We ended up spending a lot of time in REI in Seattle. It’s an amazing place with just about everything you could wish for when going on a trip. In fact, we spent almost 4 whole days there going through just about eveything we thought we would need. It’s well worth visiting if you get the chance, the website’s not bad but it’s just better in the flesh, believe me!
The equipment we bought I will list at some point under the South America trip section. It’s very hard to decide exactly on what we’ll need even though I’ve done the Transamerica tour before. At least our warm-up trip we plan to do in France/Spain should further refine what we think we’ll need. That said, the weather conditions are going to be far more varied and different in South America, perhaps even extreme in comparison to anything else I’ve ever experienced. Therefore, it will difficult to get it absolutely spot I think, perhaps there will be a lot of refinements made whilst on-route, most likely in the clothing department I’d imagine.
I love the Seattle REI. Wish mine was as nice as that one.