Hitherin Yawn

Back on the Canalway Trail today. The weather has turned grumpy: this morning it started raining the minute I left the inn. It rained for two hours and remained mostly cloudy all day, with a cold wind lowering the temperature. But I made it to the outskirts of Syracuse & managed to find a patch…

Allow me to make a distinction between walking for pleasure and walking to get somewhere. Those are two separate propositions, although I do like it when a path is fun to walk and it can also get you where you need to go. Most of this journey has been pretty fun so far. I’ve been…

So here’s a little inside scoop — and this is just for you, as a thank you for reading this blog. Don’t tell anyone else. Unless, you know, they seem like nice people who probably wouldn’t tell anyone else. I have an idea for my next book. And no, it’s not about walking across the…

By now, a real travel blogger would have given you a complete history of the Erie Canal. You’d know when construction began, when it was completed, how much it cost, and how many miles long the canal is. Your trivia bins would be overflowing with at least one fascinating infobit from every village we’ve passed…

My first day on the Erie Canalway Trail. Howdy Hoo, what a difference! The trail is paved, flat, and reasonably straight, with lots of shade except in the middle of the day. And of course, no dodging traffic. No getting pinned against a guardrail with an 18-wheeler bearing down. No jumping into a ditch because…

Let me see. Where was I? Let me check yesterday’s blog … Ah, yes. So there I was: four hours to go till sunset, four and a half hours till full dark, nothing to do in the meantime but to play round after round of lightning-and-thunder with the mozzies. It’s early yet for mosquitoes. The…

It’s 4 pm. I’m done with the day, but the day’s not done yet, so I’m laying low. I crossed the Hudson this morning. A few hours later, I crossed Interstate 87. Saratoga Springs is just to the north. Schenectady is just to the south. This is a busy little pocket of human to-and-fro-ness. I’ve…

Just a short update today. I left Bennington on Route 9, which became Route 7 when I crossed the New York state line. It’s not by any means a busy road, but it is a truck route and the left shoulder sometimes dissapeared, leaving nothing but a guardrail. You always want to walk on the…

My cold weather sleeping bag weighs three times as much as my summer bag. It takes up more than half the room inside my backpack. Packing up in the morning takes 20 minutes, and the bulk of that time is spent trying to stuff my bulky old bag back into the bottom of my pack….

There’s a section in the live version of The Legend of Pedestrio where I talk about how there’s not a patch of ground anywhere on the planet that Pedestrio hasn’t walked across too many times to count. After all, Pedestrio has been wandering this Earth for a thousand lifetimes. No matter how big the world…