Walking Journal and Walking Stories

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Keep track of your walkabouts, aimless treks, and long winded meandering traipsing abouts.

The impetus to this thread? I walked home from work today to see how long it might take and to see if it would be a worthy routine for exercise.

From Manhattan to Astoria, Queens. It took me 50 minutes to walk from West 17th St. to the 59th St. bridge. About 60 blocks in total.

Then it took me a stunning 2 minutes to cross the 59th St. bridge which crossed the East River. I didn't realize how long that bridge really is.

When I got home, my total trek took 1 hour and 50 minutes (with one stop at a street vendor to get a souvlaki in pita bread, one block away from home).

And according to Google Maps, it's about 6 miles for the trek.

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@tsarstepan,

Great thread idea, cat ears.
I'm an old city walker, big time, but also an old slug, presently.
The bad news is that I hate (long time despising, sorry) James Taylor's voice. I don't want to see the video, how about the lyrics?

With any luck, you'll get me walking more. You, of course, are spoiled, you don't live in tractville.

I don't shun tracts like I did, and I was early at it, but that's another thread. I don't shun them, I just want to remake them.

Ok, ok, I'll report.

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@ossobuco,

Quote:

Moving in silent desperation
Keeping an eye on the Holy Land
A hypothetical destination
Say, who is this walking man?

Well, the leaves have come to turning
And the goose has gone to fly
And bridges are for burning
So don't you let that yearning
Pass you by
Walking man, walking man walks
Well, any other man stops and talks
But the walking man walks

Well the frost is on the pumpkin
And the hay is in the barn
An Pappy's come to rambling on
Stumbling around drunk
Down on the farm

And the walking man walks
Doesn't know nothing at all
Any other man stops and talks
But the walking man walks on by
Walk on by

Most everybody's got seed to sow
It ain't always easy for a weed to grow, oh no
So he don't hoe the row for no one
Oh for sure he's always missing
And something is never quite right
Ah, but who would want to listen to you
Kissing his existence good night

Walking man walk on by my door
Well, any other man stops and talks
But not the walking man
He's the walking man
Born to walk
Walk on walking man
Well now, would he have wings to fly
Would he be free
Golden wings against the sky
Walking man, walk on by
So long, walking man, so long

So it's not necessarily a timely song since we're midst the onset of spring....

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@tsarstepan,

Bleeping heck!! My five key on my keyboard didn't work in my original post. Major typo. It took me 25 minutes to cross the 59th St. bridge not 2 minutes. Mad

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@tsarstepan,

I love James Taylor, tsar, and osso is right. This is a great idea.

How about Fats and Ricky, then.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWfsJx1ycY0

Walked to the beach today. Beautiful

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Thanks for the lyrics.

Well, we all don't love the same poetry/songs about walking. That one didn't win my cold heart, at all.

But that's a kind of prevaricating. I don't think of anyone's poetry when I am walking but filaments of my own in the making.

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@ossobuco,

Going further, I like poetry, can be stopped short by it. I don't memorize it, and never take it for a walk.

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@ossobuco,

Do you listen to music when you go a trekking? Me? I listened to WQXR [classical music] and WNYC [NPR news] on my new(ish as in one week old) Sony Walkman portable radio.

My iPod is kind of acting funny (annoying headphone connection glitch) so I've only been listening to it when I'm at work.

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@ossobuco,

I see I'm being about me, and not meaning that entirely.

A lot of people walk with headphones, whatever they call them now. I've never done that. Not that I am somehow pure, maybe that I am tech stupid, but I've walked a long time with nothing in my ears but the sounds around me. Friends tell me they never walk because their neighborhood is so boring. Almost no one's neighborhood is more boring than mine now. Still, there is stuff to look at. Quail...
but individual assertiveness sort of squishes out.

I speak as someone who did a photoseries about a mobile home tract in the early eighties. I do look..

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@ossobuco,

The natural world can be its own lively soundtrack and personal score.

Your way is safer in terms that you will less likely walk out into the intersection and get run over by a city bus that just ran the red light. It's not tech stupidity. It's actually being street wise.

Me? I admittedly have a tad bit of ADD (undiagnosed mind you). So I keep my self preoccupied with the streets and buildings AND the music and chitter chatter of the news and talking heads of NPR.

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@tsarstepan,

No - we are different that way, well, you and me and most others. I look when I walk, or zone out, but mostly look.

I'm not sure when I started looking at nuances. Long, decades, before these venice photos..

A friend of mine, Nancy Giffin, and I, decided to photograph the venice walk streets, and we did. We took hundreds of photos that year, and tried to write up our distinctive points of view, agreeing to not just agree, but we had trouble writing it up - in an effort to put that all together. And our photos varied, re mm lens shots, as well..

I still have data as she has, and we are still friends.

Meantime, the walk streets have changed.

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@tsarstepan,

I just assume I'm a.d.d. My cousin is an expert in all that, and I'm anti. To date, I think of all this as normal.

Streets, buildings, music, chitter... so good.

You want to blanket it with news from npr, you'll be missing something.

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@ossobuco,

Not to keep arguing. I plan a walk in the morning.

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I have walked/hiked the 492.55 sq miles of the Uncompaghre Plateau. I have seen pumas and bears and deer, I have sat alongside the Dominquez creek and watched the brook trout thick as flies in the small ponds along the creek and slept under the ponderosa, drank cowboy coffee cooked on the embers of pine cones and I walked some miles of rutted wagon roads made when the prospectors searched for the never-found gold and silver believed to be hidden on the plateau. I never had music to listen to nor desired it. In the 20 years that I did this walking I encountered one other person; a woman probably in her 50's carrying a backpack and singing, we said hello as we passed on the trail.

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@dyslexia,

Tell us more, dys..

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the Uncompraghre Plateau

http://lh3.ggpht.com/_oBCsY_gmNHA/RndLUZ8WlrI/AAAAAAAAACs/gHtm39sFcKw/DSC02880.JPG

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@ossobuco,

Plus, I've always had weird eyes, I need to look - for defense. Cutting to shorthairs, I've always had tunnel vision, which means I fall, hit my head on stuff, and in later years have some trouble with just looking re complications. I'm presently much better.

I don't mean that my observations are more piquant - a whole bunch of my lifetime observations are straightforward normal, especially recently.

But back to walking the boring f.n neighborhood, and needing to have music or news... I so do not get it. Look harder.

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@dyslexia,

puma on the plateau

http://dnr.state.co.us/ImageDBImages/20115Vignette.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2542/3933073814_53b100fd60_b.jpg

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Aaaaahhhhh, mesa-country. I miss it.

I walk. I tend to do so in the woods or in the park-like cemeteries we have in this area. Spring is a good season for it. No mosquitoes or midges, but plenty of frogs, snakes and birds. Canadian and American Mayflower are a-bloom now. Next month we'll have lady slippers. In June the sticky, bright spring leaves settle into their mature greens and shade the pathways. July and August bring rhododendrons, mountain laurel, blueberries and summersweet.

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@dyslexia,

So, how did you get up there?

plus I don't understand where dys was.. given littlek's photo.

1 Reply

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