We have never packed for anything like this before. As a family the closest we have come is our National Park Tour. We thought we did pretty good packing for different temps, sleeping accommodations, and areas for 16 days in our Acadia.
Well there are no vehicles this time, and we need to carry everything we take for 10 months. So, we decided to pack using hiking backpacks. The thought process was that we need to be pretty mobile, we suspect we will often be moving all our stuff. This is especially true during our train travel. Years, back when Elizabeth and I were young and without kids we hiked the Grand Canyon, which we still had our backpacks. Our packs were easy enough, just get them out of storage and ready, they needed a little cleaning. The girls were a different story.
Selecting the Right Pack for the Girls
With our girls I figured we would run down to REI or another outdoor store have the girls try on a couple of packs and pick one. Not so fast. Did you know that a kid should only carry 10-20% of the body weight in a backpack? It really should be in the 10-15% and 20% is really the max for short periods. Kaleigh is somewhere around the 50 pound marker, so she should only carry 5-10 pounds. It does not take much of a pack to carry 5-10 pounds. I think this is why there are not many packs, with hip belts, for girls our size and age. So the search began.
We started by going to REI, Gander Mountain and every other outdoor store in our area. At all of them the kids packs were simply book bags. We felt pretty strongly we wanted to get a full pack with hip support. The closest we came was at REI, who had a kids Deuter pack sizable, which they said was their smallest pack, but it was still about 1 inch big on Brooklyn. I liked the Deuter pack and started researching if we could adjust it any futher, in doing so I found Deuter made slightly smaller pack. It was only sold on online. We ordered it. The pack fit Brooklyn great, it is just about an inch big on Kaleigh, so we figure we will stretch her for the next month :)!
The Packs
Now, what to fill these things up with!
