Category: Uncategorized
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A Mary Christmas
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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Preparing for a Thru Hike: Shoes
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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The Florida Trail Begins!
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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Preparing for a Thru Hike: Gear and Getting to the Trailhead
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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Preparing for a Thru Hike Then and Now: Food and Fuel Resupply
People ask me what it is like to prepare for a long hike and how it has changed over time. While there is no one answer that fits for every person or even every hike, there are some common dominators. Some of these have not changed since I began long distance hiking almost 50 years…
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Thank You
A quick message to say thank you to all of you who want to support my writing. I spent almost all of today, figuring out how to do the upgrade and make things work with WordPress. Literally, I spent at least ten hours on it. I also went to the post office to mail my…
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Shall I Keep Blogging
I am about to set off on the florida trail and have just discovered that my storage space for a free wordpress account is all used up. To get three more GB it would cost me about $50 per year plus taxes etc and to get 13 GB it would cost 100 per year. Having…
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The Next Adventure Begins
This blog is going to be different than most. There’s so much I want to say and write but I’ve been putting off the writing until I felt I had the brain power and focus. Unfortunately that never works with writing. Writing really is work of some sort and like any other work, putting it…
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My Crazy Endeavor
I’ve never been a fan of hiking with earphones, preferring instead to listen to the sounds of nature around me. I was also concerned about using up the battery on my phone if I was listening to a podcast while hiking. However, I know that listening to something while walking can make the miles go…
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The Importance of Friends
I view the time I spent when I first got home, staring for way too many hours at the computer screen, as a kind of percolating, waiting for my internal system to catch up with my external body in the major transition it had to make from thru hiking to relative inactivity. It was the…
The Mary Badass 