Urban Hiking

As many of you who have read my blog know, I have a step-counter and am a little bit obsessed with “getting steps” (10,000 at least) every day. I usually get around 5,000 steps at work, leaving me with another 5,000 steps to get after I arrive at home. Usually, that’s not too much of a problem, but if I arrive home with fewer than 5,000 steps, it can be challenging to get all those steps just walking around our apartment complex.

Yesterday, I arrived home with about 2,800 steps -- a new low for me. Getting up to 10,000 required an intervention, not just a little additional effort. Les, who has become committed to getting me 10,000 steps every day (come hell or high water), suggested a small “urban hike” to make up my deficit. “Let’s walk to our Post Office and back,” he said. Because this is exactly the type of adventure that strikes my fancy, I was chomping at the bit to head out.

Our Post Office is probably about a mile and a half away from us. There are no sidewalks where we live. We have to walk through a construction area that doesn’t have much of a shoulder for a short part, but the rest of our route is either off of the main road or on a road that has a very generous shoulder. We kind of walk past my office on our route and, since I have often wondered if I could walk to work, I was interested to see how long it took us to walk to the Post Office and how dangerous it was to be a pedestrian in a non-pedestrian-friendly area.

It took us about 45 minutes to make the walk each way. This was because we kept stopping to check out things we had never noticed when driving this same route. It’s amazing how much you see when you’re moving at a slow pace: turtles swimming in a pond, baby geese and their parents, old computer monitors dumped in the bushes, a collection of beer bottles in the woods, a parking lot that is easy-in/how-do-I-get-out, unusual businesses you’ve never heard of, weird flowers and trees, and even interesting-looking people encapsulated in their cars driving by.

You also never notice the hills when you’re driving in your car. There’s one killer hill that is long and gradual and I was convinced that we would never make it to the top. But we did, and then there we were . . . at the Post Office.

I have to say that I felt a great sense of accomplishment after we did this walk. I told a lot of people about it and took pride in their looks of, “What on earth were you thinking? Who walks on streets?!” Although it’s obviously much more productive to drive from Point A to Point B, it’s interesting to find out what is within walking distance of your house and what it is like to walk somewhere instead of driving there, the world blurring by your car windows.

Save gas – try walking somewhere.