By: Blonde Two
This Blonde has a new toy to play with. I am not sure if it is just me but I am in the habit of going out and buying myself a present just after Christmas. This is usually billed as “sales shopping” but often ends up being a full price item.
This year it was a new day sack. For the uninitiated among you, this is a rucksack that you fill with too much stuff and carry around all day as opposed to a bigger rucksack that you fill with even more stuff and heave ungracefully to a wild camp site.
I have been on my my quest for a new day sack for a long time now. It has been the subject of many discussions with Blonde One during which we mentally designed the perfect one for us. I am very excited to announce that this one fulfills all of my essential criteria; it has pockets on the waist strap for my lip salve, Wine Gums and tissues, it has an “away from the back” system which helps to reduce sweat levels and, most importantly, it can expand to fit in even more stuff (will talk about the stuff on another day).
I have, however, discovered one issue that did not appear (or I did not notice) with my old rucksack. I am a well endowed Blonde (cue search engine errors) and the part of me that is between the waist and chest strap gets a bit – well, how shall we say it – squeezed together – in the middle. While I find this a bit disconcerting, I guess it could be construed as an advantage, we girls do, after all, pay a lot of money for bras that do exactly the same thing!
I don’t feel I am qualified to comment on the female difficulties with the rucksack! However I can comment on day bag.
When I go hill walking I believe in taking something for every eventuality. As a consequence I end up with a rucksack that weighs as much as a small child on my back! When you making an ascent of 3,000 ft + then this becomes a bit of a challenge. The contents include enough water for 6 cups of tea so that I can have a drink and admire the scenery, this is carried in a metal flask.
I like to carry a 2nd breakfast of cereal, that means another container and since I need plenty of milk for the cereal and tea this requires another flask for the milk. Enough food to keep me alive if I were to be stranded in an Alaskan Wilderness for 4 days. Suitable clothing for any season and sudden blizzard plus the usual neccesities. So as you will appreciate it requires a measure of fitness to transport the said items to the top of a mountain.
The problem I have with my rucksack ( daybag ) is the many compartments it has and I tend to lose things I need in a sort of rucksack abyss. I can feel the item but locating the compartmen is like trying to find your way out of Hampton Court Maze. So that’s my experience of walking with the daybag.
As for your problem is this something that the manufacturers of outdoor accessories could work on for the ladies??
Ah! Now my day rucksack has to have one vital feature – it must be thin nylon material. (It’ll get wet, do I hear you shout?) True. But I’ve tried ’em all. My first one was canvas – it got very wet indeed and stayed that way for about 3 weeks, in spite of a heatwave. Then I had a bright orange job specially for the Lakeland Fells, complete with lap-strap, chest-strap, ski-strap (never used); it had a pocket just right for my camcorder, which was BIG in those days. It had a zip round 3 sides, so every time you opened it, you displayed all your emergency underwear to the world, and generally spilled out the lot. Broughy says my rucksack must contain Go-Cat. (He’s my dog.) The blue one only had one pocket and one buckle, not good for the water bottle. The thing is, my little nylon green rucksack is now 30 years old, has been stitched more times than I care to remember, gets soaked regularly and dries in an hour or two, and all the junk stays dry anyway, wrapped in a plastic bag. And it’s green – birds aren’t supposed to be upset by green. After all, trees are green, grass is green; but it is my belief that every bird in Britain is born with an instinct that knows human greens (and British Army dpm.)