Until Next Time...

I'm writing this post from Florida.  The state, not the street.  My husband accepted a job offer outside of West Palm so we moved back east this month.  It seems full-circle that we moved back to Florida around Memorial Day, since we had moved from Florida to California on Memorial Day, 2008.

I started this blog for a few reasons - to document my training for the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer 2010, to catalog my absurd and beautiful finds around San Francisco, and then eventually to keep me motivated to finish my goal of walking every street in the city - roughly 1,000 miles of winding pavement.

I made it 589 miles before I moved away.  589.  That's a big number.  Especially for someone who prior to this silly adventure considered the walk from the parking garage to the Metreon long.  But 589 isn't 1,000.  It's just over half.  And so, I'm not finished.  I will keep this blog up so that one day when I'm ever back in the Bay Area, I can pick up where I left off.

Feel free to spend some time looking through my walks posted on here.  Leave messages if you'd like.  I still monitor them.  And if you want to see what my new hobby is, feel free to stop over at my new blog, Funny Shade of Green to watch me bumble through green parenting.

 

Thank you to everyone who supported me through  this journey.  Thank you to Jasper, Bob and Sheila for driving me to the tops of hills around town so I could walk down them.  Thank you to Chris, Alexis, Mai, Sam, Kelly, Heather, Nancy, Richard Angela, and especially Goose for being my walking buddies on even those coldest days. 

Thank you to the SF Chronicle and the Ocean Beach Bulletin for taking an interest in my hobby.  Thank you to my boss, John, for letting me wear sneakers to our law office so I could walk at lunch.  Thank you to Christine, Colin and Sarah for talking me into doing the Avon Walk which started this whole thing in the first place.

 

And, of course, thank you to San Francisco for being the most gorgeous, quirky, delicious, surprising and safe city to walk in the entire world.  The hills are ass-kickers, but the locals are divine.  I'm going to miss you, no doubt about it.  

Winter 2012 Stats and the Method to My Mapness

WINTER2012: 14.5 miles

SINCE I STARTED: 589 miles

I didn't take many walks this winter, but I did knock out a few more miles in the Sunset, Richmond, Hayes Valley and Bernal Heights.  All were great walks.

Someone asked me a while back how I track my walks on my master maps like the one above. Here's the secret: it's kind of low-fi.  I just use Photoshop to draw my courses in manually. About a year (and several hundred miles) into this project, I discovered a bunch of nifty walk-tracking websites that use gps in your smartphone to keep precise record of your every step. But at the time I didn't actually own a smart phone and once I did, I didn't want to change horses mid-walk, so opted to continue my manual method.

To create a simple walking maps like this one:

I use the website gmap-pedometer.com, which is a very basic course-tracking website but gets the job done as far as I'm concerned. It offers a terrain view so I can tell if my course is headed straight up a mountain or not.  I have been very happy with ceremoniously printing each paper map to hold in my hand as I walk. Of course, like I say, there are a bunch of fancy websites out there that use gps in your phone to track your walks and save the tree by allowing you to just follow the course on your phone.

For fun, here are a few of my master maps from the beginning through today.

September 2009

April 2010

January 2011

March 2012