Gearing Up

We took a jaunt to the Sacramento REI this morning with Richard, who needed to find a replacement hat for the one he borrowed from a colleague for our Salton Sea trip.

REI is like a dream palace for outdoor gearheads. Anything you could possibly want on a backpacking, camping, canoeing, or bicycle trip has been thought through, designed, produced, produced again but smaller and lighter and more expensive, and is available for top dollar on shelves of attractively packaged things. That nobody really needs. Or maybe they do, but they’re easy to make or improvise or really just do without. (Does the world really need twelve different grades of polartec?)

I was REALLY tempted by a cotton-lycra-knit hat-cum-neck-gaiter that, well, I don’t really need, except it was interestingly draped around the cardboard cutout of a woman’s head, well designed and pushing hard. It would take about twenty minutes to make such a piece of clothing, but then what would you use it for? I exercised RESTRAINT.

We settled for some dark chocolate Toblerone that Richard kindly bought and ordered some things online later on in the day from the much more reasonably priced Campmor.