Monday, August 26, 2019

another piece falls into place

My Survival Tabs have arrived, although not in the form I suspected. I had thought I was going to get a large pack with tons of tablets in it, but instead, I got lots of tiny packets, each with four tablets in it:


The purpose of these tablets is merely to keep me alive during the four days of camping that I'll be doing on the trail. Each little packet contains 240 calories of energy, plus assorted nutrients like Vitamins A and C, calcium, thiamin (B1), riboflavin (B2), niacin, Vitamin E, Vitamin B6, folic acid, Vitamin B12, iodine, Vitamin B5, and zinc—not to mention protein, carbs, fat, etc. Above, you see only six of the eight packets I'll be taking along with me. Since I've got eight packets, I'll be eating two packets' worth of Survival Tabs every afternoon that I'm camping. This won't amount to much energy or nutrition, but it's written in the product literature that Survival Tabs are for exactly that: survival, and nothing more. In theory, I could survive walking without food (but not water) for two straight days, but that's an insane risk to take for a short walk across a small country. So the tablets are a sort of insurance, a way to keep my body going without fear of fainting or black-hole-style bodily implosions.

At some point very soon, I'm going to stuff everything into my backpack and take a shakedown cruise, a several-hour walk just to get out the kinks and see what it's like to hike with the pack on my back. My major worry is that the Gregory's chest strap, whose stupid design hasn't changed since 2008, is going to pop off after only a day or so of use. Luckily, I've still got my spare strap in case that happens. I've been tempted to nickname that strap Molasses, but thus far, I've resisted the dad-jokiness of the pun.



2 comments:

Charles said...

Let the corniness flow through you. Give into the pun, and it will make you powerful!

Also, I am morbidly curious how "delicious" those tablets really are.

Kevin Kim said...

They taste about as gross as powdered milk, with a little vanilla flavoring.