Your first question may be why purchase an unscented deodorant? That answer is simple, smell too nice and the mosquitoes will come your way. So when I was presented with a choice of Mitchum, which I’d used just fine before, and Tom’s of Maine, I chose to give Tom’s a try.
The deodorant itself did something, but I’m not sure what. The burning sensation I had in my armpits when using this Tom’s Deodorantwas painful and did not go away as quickly as I would have liked. The packaging was also sub-par in that it broke rather quickly and I could no longer rotate the screw at the bottom to make more “stick” available for use. …

Pentax Optio W60 Digital Camera
Ultimately we chose the Pentax Optio W60 over the Olympus Stylus 1030SW because of the storage medium. The Olympus uses a more expensive, proprietary technology (the xD picture card) that is limited to 2GB of capacity and also limits movies to 10 seconds or less. While there are ways around the movie limit, it is currently not possible to get around the 2GB storage limit.
Enter the Pentax Optio W60. Pentax uses the common SD memory card which has no limit storage limit and I can purchase 16GB cards for less than $30..about the same that a 2GB xD picture card for the Olympus costs. The Optio does not go as deep under water as the Olympus, …

Our time in the USA quickly came to an end and yesterday we began our trek through South America. While we spent most of the time being stuffed with delicious food (there goes the weight we lost from Central America), we also spent an inordinate amount of time at outdoor equipment stores like REI.  In fact we went to two different REI’s in the Atlanta area.  After four months of use a lot of our equipment had either failed or begun to fail on us so it was time to exchange and resupply.  We’ve added a number of gear reviews to the website if you are interested and as always you can get an up to date list of our …

So  now we’re home in the states for a week so we’ll take this opportunity to take stock of how we’ve done so far and what it is we need to change.  Overall, it looks like our preparation has paid off.  We’ve rarely been without something we’ve needed and have never been completely unprepared.  Since leaving the US we have not met another backpacker with smaller packs than we have (we do have the added benefit of being able to share a few things) but we have met many with things we wish we did have.
Our supplies have treated us well but we are swapping a few things out that don’t seem to be standing up to the wear and …