It has taken me a while to get used to a major optical illusion seen across the Florida swamps. Known as cypress domes, these featues are not domes at all. While viewed from almost any distance cypress domes look like small hills, they are in fact depressions! The reason for this is as follows: cypress

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The Florida trail is unique in that it hosts a kick off event each year allowing hikers to meet other aspiring Florida trail thru hikers. A large section of a campground is rented. Thirty or more volunteers show up. Multiple tents are erected with multiple grills, warming dishes and numerous tables loaded with food. Hikers

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Meeting Pam Casteel and her tribe of adopted special needs young adults when I was hiking the CDT was a highlight of that trail for me. We have maintained contact over the years. Pam knows I’ve struggled to recover from childhood abuse, especially after the way my ex-husband walked out on me. She intuitively and

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An important thing to determine on each hike is what shoes to wear. For the Florida trail I found this fairly challenging because of the many swamps and promise of wet feet for much of the trail. Also, since this is the first big hike, I’m doing after breaking both my feet on the Pacific

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This is a very short interlude blog between other blogs to share with you some of the pictures of the Florida trail, which I have in fact begun hiking. Currently, I am 48 miles in and it usually takes a week for the blogs to catch up with me in real time. But in the

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One of the first things I do in preparing for a long hike is figuring out how I am going to get to the trailhead. I like driving my car for a number of reasons. I don’t like putting my pack on a plane and if I do that, I can’t take stove fuel with

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