One of these days, I really have to get started again on the England trip journal entries. The good part is yet to come – walking in Yorkshire and climbing over dozens of stylish stiles.
Walking used to be a much bigger part of my life before I bought a car and became a suburbonaut – when I lived in Seattle, I didn’t own a car, and often walked home from work when I lived in Fremont and worked at the top of Queen Anne Hill. It was about a 45 minute walk, mostly downhill, through some of the prettiest and most interesting neighborhoods in Seattle. It was not strenuous walking and I never felt like I was really “working out” that much.
A few months after moving here and becoming much more sedentary, I gained about 40-50 pounds.
It’s clear to me that I need to start walking a lot more – David and I talk about it but never seem to do anything about it. Something mentioned in Mediatinker (home of the totally excellent illustrated MT templates) makes me wonder if I shouldn’t get a pedometer and start trying to achieve the “10,000 steps a day” goal.
I enjoyed reading the recent “urban hiking in Japan” stories at Mediatinker, and there are certainly places in the Chicagoland area where you could go for a long pleasant ramble. There are many more places where going for a simple walk is almost impossible, given the fact that pedestrian walkways (not to mention bikeways) are usually low priorities for most urban and suburban localities around here. I used to complain about how horrible it was to walk in the area of our old condo in Palatine, because we were hemmed in on 3 sides in a triangle bounded by 3 nearly impassible arterials (including an expressway). Since moving there the walking possibilities are better – we can actually walk to a couple of nearby restaurants – but it’s not very scenic or pleasant walking.
Suburbs. Ehhh. And I swore I’d never be a part of suburban blight, too.
At least where we are, there are nearby forest preserves and wetlands. Just this morning, I had to drive carefully around a pair of ducks intent on crossing the road to find a nesting site. The first year we were in the house, a duck nested behind the garage, but she lost her clutch of eggs to something – probably one of the neighborhood rackety-coons. Somehow, Nature in her sneakily subversive way manages to overcome even asphalt and strip malls.
The weather today isn’t any good for walking, unless you’re one of those wackily lovable English types — or a duck. But it’s possible to walk a reasonable “circuit” under cover here at work on the lunch hour, so maybe I can start doing that.
Maybe I should start doing that.
Final note – days without candy: I dunno, lost count. Woohoo! Still have not had any candy or soda (pop, Co-Cola, soft drink, what-have-you) since I started the ‘no candy, no Coke, no creamer’ diet. However, I did have some totally awesome Coldstone ice cream on Sunday night after we saw that weirdly wonderful Jim Carrey movie “Eternal Sunshine…”
Whoa. That movie rocked. When we got out of it, we felt all spacy and goofy, like our brains had been scrubbed til they were shiny and new. However, the ice cream was probably not the best choice for a “glad we’re alive and not living the life we just saw in that movie” treat.
And we should definitely have gone for a walk.