The Jewel of New England

Location	Block Island, Rhode Island
Type	Great Base Lodging
Mode	On Foot, Bike, or Rocking Chair
Highlights	Tranquility

The same great, mile-high glacier that parked ten to twenty miles off of southern New England and heaped up Nantucket and the Vineyard for Massachusetts, and the Forks of Long Island for New York, also left behind an appropriately diminutive summer playground for little Rhode Island.

Location	Fairfield County, CT., and a little bit of NY
Type	Village, countryside
Distance	Just under 30 miles, (or 20 miles if you take the train partway)
Duration	Three Days, two nights
Difficulty	Easy to moderate (second day was 14 miles)
Highlights	Small towns, historic inns, great food and drink

: 

It's easy to travel inn to inn along Fairfield County's trails and mainstreets. This walk, from the Silvermine Tavern in Norwalk, to Ridgefield's Stonehenge Inn crosses into New York state for a stretch. Though it was late fall when Anne Lutz Fernandez (author of the recently published book Carjacked, The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on our Lives) trekked the twenty-something miles from inn to inn and back, this is an ideal walk for (almost) any season. And  it's a cinch to hop on the train if you only want to walk in one direction.

Looking Around the Big Bend

Location	Texas: Big Bend
Type	Great Base Lodging
Duration	Not less than two nights
Difficulty	Moderate to strenuous, depending on trail choice and season
Distance	Got Milk?
Highlights	Hikes, Fossils, Petroglyphs, Sun

We arrived at the Chisos Mountain Lodge with not much of an itinerary except to walk together in the heat and sun, to explore as much of the vast park as we could and be back on our way home in a week.  The last time I lived with my dad for more than three or four days was decades ago; the last time I spent more than a few hours entirely alone with him was never.  I didn’t know what we would talk about for all that time, but I knew it would include a thousand unanswerable questions posed by him about the nature of truth, the identity of God, the possibility of a vast right wing conspiracy, and the meaning of life.  If you know my dad, you understand.

Adirondack Idyll

Location	Saranac Lake, New York
Type	Lake, Mountain, River,
Distance	30 miles, give or take, depending on your propensity to zizag.
Highlights	Mid-summer in the Adirondacks.
Duration	3-5 days
Difficulty	easy, with the exception of the rapids at the end, which can be skipped or portaged.

We paddled out onto Middle Saranac Lake on a breezy summer afternoon with no other plan than to revisit the scene of some happy voyages I had undertaken during the writing of my first book, The Adirondacks: A History of America's First Wilderness, and to fill in a few blanks in our personal map of the park.  The route we had in mind was part of the magnificent Northern Forest Canoe Trail, which officially opened in 2005. It’s kind of like an Appalachian Trail for paddlers, linking rivers and lakes from the middle of New York State to the top of Maine, but we had no intention of going even a tenth that far.  We were just out for a leisurely paddle, mixing a night or two of camping with a couple of days in town.