Starts with a Single Step

 Every journey has to begin somewhere.  Here is ours.  And this is where I'll be documenting our adventures, so thank you for stopping by!

My 10 year old daughter and my 56ish year old knees are setting out to walk the East Coast Greenway trail, which runs, as the name promises, along the East Coast, from Calais, Maine to Key West, Florida.  We initially toyed with the idea of taking a year off from our lives to thru-walk it all in one go, but the realities of actually having a life and people who would probably miss us if we were gone for 300+ days caused us to rein in our grandiose plans and morph them into a series of more bite-sized adventures.

Our actual, more realistic plan is to attack this thing in tiny (and occassionally slightly larger) pieces.  Eventually we will do several trips a year to check off 100 miles of trail at a time, but first we need to train, so we're going to take the next year or so to prepare for those bigger adventures by traversing the Connecticut and Rhode Island portions of the trail in increasingly longer walks.  

Today was our official launch, and one of our puppers, Quill, decided to join us and provide a bit of a security detail.  I'm not sure he'll always be with us, especially on the longer trips, as occasionally one of the other doggos may want to get in on the act, and every once in a while I may enjoy NOT having to carry full poop bags with me while I walk.

In any case, today was a lovely 40-something spring day in Connecticut as we traversed 2.5 miles between the Charter Oak Greenway parking lot near Porter St. in Manchester and Bolton Notch in Bolton.  In addition to Quill, The Map Man (aka my hubby) also walked the same trail segment, albeit in the opposite direction.  I'm not sure he'll commit to all 3000 miles of this journey, but it certainly was nice to be able to arrange a one-way trip with a ride at the other end.  It's a strategy I plan to continue whenever possible. 

We handled the distance fairly well, considering that 1 to 1.25 miles is our standard daily stroll.  It took us about an hour and a half (half an hour less for The Man, whose knees are exponentially more functional than mine), and we were fairly tired by the end, so I think this was a good distance to start with.  My legs are sore, but in that good "I got some exercise" kind of way.  My knees held up pretty well (today I wore an Incrediwear brace), although I definitely need to remember to pass the leash around behind me rather than spinning around when the dog gets tangled.  Nothing bad happened, but it certainly could have, and I don't want to do anything to set myself back now that we're off to a good start!

2.5 miles down, 2997.5 miles to go!