Today was a great day for shopping for a lot of minor yet very significant gear for the trek in Nepal. Of course I’m very fortunate that Richard already has pretty deep pile (literally) of hiking gear, so a lot of the major items are covered: trekking clothes, sleeping bags, day packs, bottles, tents, and so on. Pema was randomly reiterating all the time that I’ll definitely need some thermal underwear, and it sounds like he knows what he’s talking about. I imagine he literally froze his behind off at some point. Fortunately I have had the great experience in the past to gear up for US Army field exercises, and I grew to love some of the cold weather specialties they provided. The keyword for then and for today’s shopping spree was “polypro” or polypropylene. This amazing engineered material has found countless applications, from the Tic Tacs lids to polymer banknotes in Australia. Amazingly it is one of the most common components in cold weather and water wicking gear. Just about everything I bought today had a substantial content of this plastic material.