Sarah Milstein on urban hiking

Sarah Milstein, Boing Boing's chief loop closer, has a piece in the New York Times about "urban hiking" -- a way to get exercise and socialize at the same time.

Plan your route, and – this is going to sound crazy – assume you’ll go a mile or maybe two an hour. With a group, you’ll move a lot more slowly than you expect. We usually aim for about five miles (www.gmap-pedometer.com is good for figuring out distances) and include about six points of interest and two takeout food stops. To allow for lots of conversation, keep your highlights farther apart than the typical walking tour and mostly brief. (If your group includes strollers and dogs, don’t forget to plan a route that will work for them.)

Link

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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daisymay

The best part of my daily( most of the time) routine is a rapid walk and nonstop talk with my friends and neighbors around South Minneapolis’ amazing lakes, oak groves, creeks etc.
Otherwise a power walk in the same neighborhood, to my amazingly eclectic iPod will do. But I do prefer the excellent company.
Jardine

@#5, Not me. That would require getting off my butt to go for a walk. And it’s really more of a village. But yeah, a large percentage of the population know most of the people. It’s not like everyone likes everyone else though. A lot of people who live here grew up here and went to school here. Quite a few are related to each other somehow, but we’re not isolated so the people aren’t inbreeding.
help i cant comfirm my username themelonbread

@SeattlePete: It’s a shame anybody thinks that site is funny.
sfocata

This sounds remarkably like someone desperately trying to rebrand the simple act of “popping out for a walk”.

I have no time for that… I’m going to go Urban Food Foraging later (probably at M&S) and while I’m out I’ll do some Urban News Aggregation (the Guardian, of course) and perhaps a bit of Urban Multimedia File Exchange (by taking CDs and books back to the library).
kiddr01

i see i’ve been pipped to the post with my ‘also called going for a walk’ comment.
Gilbert Wham

Nonononono, it’s more than that. It has more of a sense of adventure, because of the added magic of ‘maybe stopping for a coffee or something’ built in. This is what elevates it above your paltry ‘walk’…
Enochrewt

#5: LOL yeah, that happens. My mother lives in a very small town (Pop. 17) and they know EVERYTHING about each other. Really the population is more around 300-400 because the outlying ranches and houses don’t count in the count. It seems like they all know what you’re doing before even you do. Hell, they know what I’m doing (and me them) because of my mother even though I live two states away. When I see people I’ve met (e.g. “This is suzy, she runs the general store”) it’s considered downright rude if I don’t speak to her for a moment if I run into her.

Heck, I was at the National Western Stockshow and ran into one of my mom’s neighbors who was competing in the Stock Dog event, I knew it would be an faux paus if I didn’t say hello, even though we barely know each other. It’s just the way it’s done in small towns. Sometimes I wonder how they get anything done when they have to be so friendly all the time. Do you actully have a friendly conversation with 50 people a day while living in the city? I thought not.
hlehmann2

Always my favorite site on this topic:
walkinginla.com
SeattlePete

It’s a shame that StuffWhitePeopleLike isn’t accepting news from the New York Times any more. This one is just too perfect.
Evan Rappaport

I’m assuming that for people who live outside NYC where you can drive cars that this is a novel idea. In NYC, this is called the weekend.
Antinous

Do you actually have a friendly conversation with 50 people a day while living in the city?

When I lived in SF, I knew about a thousand people from my job and another two hundred from my volunteer job. I knew the butcher, the baker, the cheeserer, the greengrocer, the bookstore people, the art store people and the old Armenian rug guy on the corner. I knew half the people on my block (including the restraining orders). Having grown up in a small town, I don’t really find living in the city to be much different.
Jardine

Urban hike? Around these parts (a small town), we call this “going for a walk”. You may meet other people who are also going for a walk or you may see people sitting on their front porch.
Patrick Austin

Plus, it’s an excuse to wear a camelbak and some very expensive hiking boots.
Kit10inDublin

Hiking is walking
ba1234

There’s an alternative to the Gmap Pedometer:

WalkDB, you can plan a route, save it, share it, and find others in the same area, etc.
Versh

@#4, Jardine–
whoa, whoa, whoa– you actually talk to said people? That’s always interested me about small towns, is there really that level of familiarity? I mean, I can understand being chummy with the neighbors, but everyone in the small town? I think that only happens in movies, tv, and William Faulkner novels.
sonipitts

Walking has gone from exotic to downright dangerous in my neighborhood. Not because of the people so much as the (lack of) city planning.

No sidewalks, no verges, no road shoulders. Just you and the speeding traffic fighting for lane space. To get to anywhere worth going from my house on foot, you take your life into your own hands.

Instead, we drive to the Arboretum trails or a nearby rich-people’s settlement with a nice lakeside walking trail to get our walking in. Note that said lakeside trail is just about a mile away – easy walking distance, and it’d add a nice punch to our workout – but that mile is via a no verge, no shoulder, no sidewalk, 50 mph highway.

Stupid city planning.