As the admin of our team blog I have the best job – I get to update our fundraising thermometer. I get a little buzz each time I update the totals from the Just Giving website and refresh our blog to see how much the thermometer has risen. Three days out from the hike we're two tiny bars off our goal of ¥300,000. Bloody brilliant!

I remember our first meeting at my place when we were sitting around filling in the entrance form for the event and deciding how much we wanted to raise. The minimum total to participate in the event was ¥120,000, but we thought why not raise the stakes? So ¥300,000 it was. Looking back we've done an amazing job of fundraising. We sat around at that first meeting writing down ideas for fundraising but it's been our family and friends who have really helped us out with very generous donations. It's extremely humbling. Our schools have also been fantastic in allowing us to collect money.

But that's just the fundraising part. I can't believe we set off on our hike the day after tomorrow. I am getting so nervous, but I'm putting all that nervous energy into writing lists of what I'm going to pack, including clothes, food and miscellaneous things like my headlamp and loo paper. There's no way I'm carrying one gram more than I need to so I'm packing as light as possible and putting a lot extra into my bag for Toby when she meets us at Checkpoint 4. Then I can pick what I need to supplement what I'm already carrying (and also stop and make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches).

One thing I have decided on is that I will definitely be taking my SLR on the hike. I have been extremely slack with taking photos but I want to record our experience and of course post pics to our blog.

That's all for now. I'll go back to writing more lists xox

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