A week of Walks

This past week has been a week of epic Walks.

I started out with the most epic, a Tip-to-Tip Trip with three friends. For those of you not in the know, the Tip-to-Tip Trip refers to walking the island of Manhattan from one end to the other. It's a loooong walk, and was made longer by stops for bathroom breaks (yay Starbucks!), lunch breaks, catch-up breaks, etc. Still, it was a lot of fun, although on Monday my feet hated me. A lot. We started out by taking the M100 bus up as far as it would take us in Manhattan (and walked the extra block to 220th St.), then walked down Broadway as far as Washington Heights, stopped for a bathroom/refueling break, and continued down Riverside Drive. Eventually we moved back to the streets somewhere in the mid-90's, though personally I would have been happy to keep walking along the river, both because of the lack of traffic lights and because it's prettier than the streets of Manhattan. Upon a friend's suggestion, I mapped out our route at mapmyrun.com to see how far we actually walked, and it came out to about 14.2 miles - not bad for a not-so-lazy Sunday!

Tuesday night I walked the George Washington Bridge with G6. The weather was gorgeous - just cold enough to be comfortable walking in heavy coats, but not too windy or frigid. The city is so pretty at night from out on the bridge, all twinkling lights stretched out as far as the eye can see. We made good time, taking a little more than an hour to walk to New Jersey and back. I forgot to wear sneakers, but fortunately for me, my feet decided to forgive me for my error.

Today was the third trek of the week. This time I was hoofing it to Riverdale for Shabbos lunch, something I'd always thought about doing but never really got around to. Of course, I could have picked a slightly warmer day to pursue such an endeavor...but I didn't want to back down or have my hosts worry about me (well, mostly just the not wanting to back down), so I bundled up in my hat, down coat, scarf, boots and gloves and started walking. My face was numb by the time I got to 190th St. Did I turn around? Naaaaah. I just kept going and going, and again made good time, arriving in about an hour and a quarter. The truth is, it was a gorgeous day for a walk, if rather cold.

Anyway, here's to a week of Walks, and hoping that more are coming up!