I've Been Around the World

An Anniversary, of Sorts, or a Milestone, Perhaps...

I realized today that it was about 15 years ago that Donna and I moved from a two car to a one car family. I began biking to work, church and other >5 mile trips and biked for the first 7 years or so, then started walking in lieu of biking (which took more time, but I enjoy walking even more). 

And I further realized that I've now walked the equivalent (give or take) of one lap around the globe. 

Assuming walking (round trip) 5 miles to work, 5 days a week and 5 miles to church... that's about 30 miles a week. Multiply that times 50 weeks (allowing that there have been exceptions) and that times 15 years and - if my math is correct - I've walked and biked over 22,000 miles. 

Or, in another way of looking at it, that is the equivalent to having walked from the northernmost point of Alaska to the southernmost tip of South America, with plenty of room to ramble around in between... it's a whole a bunch of walking.

According to one "carbon calculator" I found, that means we've saved about 43,000 pounds of CO2 emissions and, they said, "altogether you will save or get benefits worth $155,131.60" I'm not sure what that's based upon, but it sounds sorta cool.It's certainly saved some. AAA estimates that each car in a house hold costs, on the low side, $6,000/year, so that's $90,000 for 15 years.

Anyway, it's been a great 15 years of Human Powered Motion. Here's hoping for at least one more trip around the globe... To honor the event, I present a bit of HD Thoreau, on Walking...

"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la SainteTerre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander...

They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea...

...To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order—not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust. The Chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker—not the Knight, but Walker, Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People...."