11/20/2005 -- Really on Route 2, this time.

Now that I look at a map, I realize that I had been traveling along Route 2a to get from Cambridge to Lexington and I am now really on route 2, so my witty story about my friends being kicked off the highway should go here. My apologies, JT and TC.

Having already used up my Route 2 reminiscence, I might as well talk about Bill Bryson. I recently read “A walk in the woods,” Bryson’s travel journal of his hiking of the Appalachian Trail. It imbued me with a desire to hike in much the same way that reading “Walden” imbued me with a desire to build a house.

(Side note – I mentioned this to my wife who suggested that I try building a garden box before moving on to houses. The garden box was tough enough to stick me back in reality…)

An interesting fact of “A walk in the woods” is the hundreds of gory ways in which one can die while hiking, the lovingly careful way in which Bryson describes each one of them. I think he put that in there to keep idiots from buying it on the trail after being inspired by his book. It sure worked here.

Still, what the book really gave me was a desire to appreciate the magnitude of the Earth; to get to love its life giving soil, step by laborious step. Well, I won’t. But I am finding this journal to be a wonderful substitute. In the near future, I hope to do a little more hiking, but I doubt that I will ever have the gumption to actually hike the AT.

20,000 steps today. Sheesh. How did I manage 20,000 steps? It was a Sunday so I played in the park with my kids in the morning. In the afternoon I took my eldest to a birthday party and ran around after him the whole time. In the evening my youngest got sick, so I must have put the last couple thousand of steps pacing about the house. He’s better now.

Cheers,