Our Canoe Trip Menu and Gear Planner       Back to Doug's Canoe Page

We do two different types of canoe trips, which  need different planning approaches.

In the early spring and fall we do "the guys trip". The fishermen among us believe that the fishing is better when the water is cold, and the rest of us will  accept any excuse to go canoeing. On these trips we've occasionally awoken to falling snow, portaged through knee deep mud and watched both our canoes go airborn in a windstorm. Longjohns, toques and serious raingear make a lot of sense on these trips.

In the middle of the summer, we do the annual "dads and daughters", which involves 2 fathers and 5 young ladies. On these trips, we're more likely to bring a two burner stove and a bag of marshmallows.

Over the years, we've learned to keep all this straight, and compensate for memories that are fading as we age, by using lots of checklists. These have ended up centralized in one spreadsheet that does these functions:

-accepts as input in standard cells (the bolded ones in the top left corner):
    -the start date of the trip and the total number of days (4, 5 or 6)
    -the number of adults, and the number of children
    -a brief itinerary description, as documentation
-generates a chart of day by day menus with our standard items
-calculates the total number of portions required, and produces a shopping list
-contains a checklist to note who's going to bring which items of the shared gear like tents...
-contains a checklist for personal gear that we expect each person to bring along
-includes various reminders, phone numbers, etc that are handy to have in one place

The spreadsheet is in Excel 5.0 format, which is compatible with Excel 97.Help yourself, and make whatever changes you'd like to improve it. One suggestion, though: if you're changing a value, check first to see if there's a hidden formula that produced it. You might want to modify the formula instead so it will still adjust to different numbers of participants, etc.

If you have questions about some of the admittedly cryptic notations, suggestions for improvement, or additions to the menu or gearlist sections, please Email me. (There's also an Email address in the spreadsheet.  Different one, come to think of it, but it'll still reach me.)

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