Life at Two Miles Per Hour

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"Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return--prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, brother and sister, and wife and child and friends and never see them again,--if you have paid your debts and made your will, and settled your affairs and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk."


Henry David Thoreau, Walking

  In less than one month we hope to be on the start of another adventure. In one respect it is to finish up something we started two years ago and in another it is the start of what to do next.....after we reach our goal...Mount Kathadin,  Maine....2175 miles from starting out on a very long walk from Springer Mountain, Georgia in 2008. Little did we know that this hike would have so many twists and turns before we could summit Katahdin and reflect on what we had accomplished. There are not many people who can say they walked over 2000 miles through 14 States over mountains carrying all they would need to survive on their backs! Here are the miles by state that we still have to walk to reach the northern terminus of the AT in Maine:

New York....30 miles left
Connecticut...52 miles
Massachusetts...90 miles
Vermont....146 miles
New Hampshire...161 miles
Maine....281 miles

We also plan (if we still feel strong and healthy after reaching Katahdin) to somehow get back over to the Long Trail in Vermont and "end to end" that trail. The Long Trail is the oldest established hiking trail in the country and runs the length of Vermont from the Massachusetts border north to Canada for a total distance of 273 miles. It also crosses all of Vermont's tallest peaks!

 https://www.greenmountainclub.org/page.php?id=2

This was our plan last year when we tried to complete our AT hike but got sidelined with Toesock's leukemia. This year we both feel like things will all come together for a great hike, awesome scenery, new friends and even my sister Sue and hopefully her son Chase joining us somewhere along the trail for a few days!