T-Minus 8 days
Ever since I read Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island 15-odd years ago, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of touring a country on foot. Bryson’s book chronicles his own walking tour of England and is essentially a long goodbye to a country he had grown to love. He walked or bussed from village to village, pub to pub, wayside inn to wayside inn, eating, drinking, and making friends along the way. At the time I read the book, I was living on my own adopted small island - a remote 7-mile long, 2-mile wide outpost accessible only by boat off of Maine’s icy coast. Bryson’s anecdotes wove a spell over me akin to the wanderlust Bilbo Baggins must have felt once he left the Shire. I remember thinking, does it even get better than that?!
“That sounds like the worst vacation ever.” Amber, my only full-time employee, and an intensely scheduled mom to two hockey-playing teenagers didn’t really hold back when I told her of our plans to take two weeks in July to walk 100 miles across Northern England. We laughed at that, of course. We both understand the allure of spending a week on a tropical patch of sand with nothing but a book and an ice-cold beverage to keep us company. But, even so, I was surprised that a trip like the one Steve and I had just spent weeks planning wouldn’t be universally appealing. I mean, right?
Steve (my husband) and I own and operate an artisanal chocolate making business just outside of Portland, Maine. Like most small business owners everywhere, we work too much, exercise too little, and tend to put the business’s needs above our own. As if it were a child. Or a cat. We have three of those, btw (cats, not kids), and they rule the roost at home - an airy, light-filled first-floor apartment in Portland’s East End. A walking vacation for me (a highly driven formerly athletic mid-lifer gone-slightly-to-seed) sounded like just thing at this point in my life. Some folks (ahem) decide to train for a triathlon. Or a long-distance foot race. Or an Iron Man. But c’mon! There are no pubs on a triathlon route. No cozy inns. You’re not really encouraged to stop and chat it up with the locals. Part of the ideal vacation equation to me is eating when and what I want, and getting enough exercise so that it doesn’t make a difference.
But, let’s face it, Steve and I were coming off a Maine winter, which was not only long and dark and cold, but also had more than it’s fair share of bad news among our clutch of close friends. All that to say that the actual training for our 100-mile walk tumbled quietly down our priority list.
So when we finally got around to walking in earnest sometime in March (okay, maybe it was April), we were pleasantly surprised at how, well, easy it was. I did a little cross-training by running in the mornings, and Steve did long, sweaty evening workouts on his indoor bike trainer.
But then in late April, I tripped on a dining room chair and broke my toe. NBD, I do this a lot. But this time, my whole foot swelled up and turned purple. I made myself wait until it faded to a slightly putrescent yellow before I started logging miles again, but then tripped again over a stone threshold in an NYC hotel room in May, and went right back to the bruise-colored drawing board. A couple weeks later, still nursing that aching left foot, I smacked my right on a wayward rocking chair in our home office. so, with less than a month before our trip, I decided to bench myself.
Update: With 8 days till lift-off I’m happy to report that my self-enforced time-out has done its magic. My feet are itching to hit the trail! Wanna follow along?
