Intro

Hello,
I'm Chris.
I'm from the UK and recently graduated from university with an MPhys, but the real world is scary.  It means getting a job and paying bills and doing grown-up things, so instead I'm going to go live in the woods for six months.

Sometime next year, around 13th of April, I am going to fly to America and attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail.  Wikipedia puts it at "About 2,200 miles (3,500 km)".  The exact length changes from year to year as the route shifts about a little, but the key points are that it goes from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine, going over several other mountains on the way.
Understatement of the century there, folks.
Snowdon and Ben Nevis would be feel at home amongst the mountains along the route; according to Bill Bryson (who managed maybe 40% of the trail) I'll climb the equivalent of several Mount Everests.  We'll see.

It takes on average five to seven months.  I'll have exactly six thanks to the B2 Tourism Visa.  That means hiking on average 12 miles a day.  That seems manageable.  Wolframalpha helpfully says this is approximately 0.08 to 1.5 times the speed of lava flow. Good to know.

So about that Visa, huh?  Well, if you just hop on a plane and fly to the USA from the UK you can get up to about 3 months of holiday time if you fill out some in-flight forms.  That would make the hike a little more difficult so instead I chose to get fill out longer forms at home, get interviewed and questioned by the Embassy, and receive a visa that lets me stay in the USA for 6 months of the year, every year for a decade.  Yikes.
(Sounds like a good excuse to hike some more of the US now that I have the visa....)
The Visa wasn't actually as hard or as scary as it seems.  The waiting times were the worst bits of it.  You fill out the DS-160, which can take a while, and then make an appointment at the Embassy.  I got one about two weeks after I filled my forms out.  The Embassy is a big scary building nice modern building with lots of glass.  A long wait and then a quick security check let me wait inside for another check of my forms.  You get sent upstairs for another wait before being called over to a booth, for another check of your paperwork before waiting again for the interview.  A nice American gentleman was my interviewer.  He asked me about myself and what my purposes were.  I had a load of extra evidence for the visa - like bank statements to show I could afford it - but he didn't want any of that, he just wanted a nice chat about hiking.  And that was that.
Now I have a shiny new passport with a shiny new visa in it.

And now?
Now I wait for Spring 2019 and resist the urge to buy more gear.
Gear list to follow.