All good advice above. Some quick thoughts: Keep a list with you telling you WHERE your maildrops have been sent, and there’s a good reason for doing this: I’ve seen hikers get all bent out of shape at a Post Office before realizing much later that they didn’t even have a maildrop in that town, i.e. they’d gone to the P.O. and raised a stink for nothing! And keeping track of what’s in your boxes is useful in case you ever have to “blow off” a maildrop and have it sent along later. I.e., if there’s nothing in your drop but three days of food, you can simply buy more and move on without waiting a day or two for the Post Office to open, but if that drop contains your new ATM card, or important maps, new eyeglassses, or whatever, you’re gonna want to wait to get it. So knowing what’s actually IN your drops can be useful. Also, pay attention to holidays. Several hikers ended up staying in Hanover til Tuesday morning because they’d forgotten about the Labor Day holiday, and this can be a pain in the neck, as well as being expensive; their drops contained their winter clothes, so they couldn’t really leave without them. Oh, always double check your addresses; every year hikers mess up Troutdale and Troutville, etc. And getting a Zip Code wrong can also mess things up. Finally, gotta agree with folks who have advised keeping food drops to a minimum. Unless you’re on some sort of specialized diet (vegan, kosher, etc.) or unless you’ve prepared or dehydrated your food ahead of time, there’s really no need to send yourself food on the A.T. There are a lot more places to purchase food than you might think and really, there are only a handful of places where it actually makes sense to send yourself a food-drop. Advantages to buying en route: Less wastage (as most folks put too much in a food-drop); you save $ on postage; you buy as you go, picking out stuff you actually want to eat instead of being bored to tears by food you pre-selected months before and then grew tired of; you don’t have to worry about lost or late packages, closed Post Offices, holidays, etc. You can also observe what other folks are eating and this can give you all sorts of ideas on improving your own diet. If you buy all your food ahead of time, you’re pretty much stuck with it. Oh, and put something distinctive on all of your boxes (stickers, etc.) that will make them stand out a bit from the others. In many Trail towns, your box will end up on a shelf with ninety identical boxes, and on more than one occasion, I had an employee tell me that my box wasn’t there…when I asked them to look again for boxes with stickers on them or playing cards one each end or whatever, they discovered that the boxes were indeed there. Anything that makes it easier for the P.O. employees to find your box will end up helping YOU.
Jack
