Travels with Charley in the Maine Woods.

This was not in the plan.

We have just pulled into a snow-covered parking lot in the woods 11 miles outside of Greenville, Maine.  It’s time to unload the car, slap on our skis, and take off on a four-day ski adventure through the wilderness.  This is a remote part of Maine my wife and I love; I took her on her first wild canoe trip not far from here, produced a bottle of champagne and a diamond ring beside a lake devoid of buildings or people, and while she now probably regrets this, she said yes. This is our first trip to such hallowed ground with our two boys.  The plan is to ski a few hours to a heated lodge run by the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC), where they will feed us fabulous meals and provide us with a heated private cabin for the night, while someone snowmobiles in our luggage so we don’t have to.  Then tomorrow we’ll ski to another lodge, stay an extra day doing nothing there, and ski back to our car on day four. 

Oh yeah, this looks good...you go first.

We can't wait for spring to come so we can check out the George S. Mickelson Trail  in the Black Mining Hills of Dakota.It goes though 109 Miles of the best of South Dakota, from Edgemont to Deadwood.  On a bike it's relatively easy to go fully inn to inn.  On foot, however, you may find yourself occasionally sleeping under twinkling stars between evenings you walk into town and book a room in the local saloon and check in only to find Gideon's Bible.

He Just Keeps Rollin'

When most people think of traveling across America they envision going from salt to salt--Atlantic to Pacific or vice versa.  But America's newest cross-country cycling route is neither of those.  The Mississippi River Trail (MRT) follows the river as closely as is practical from its pristine headwaters at Itasca State Park in Minnesota, to the southernmost point in Lousiana, on the Gulf of Mexico.  Whether you travel down from the Big Woods to the Big Easy, or up from Cajun country to the land of the Cheeseheads doesn't make much difference: the Mississippi is the big muddy heart of the heartland, and any trip along it is bound to be memorable.

 Slip Sliding Our Way

“The technical term is glissade,” said Erica Marcus with a smile.  “That’s what you probably want to call it when you get back home.” 

My friends and I took to the new word with alacrity, trying it out and rolling it around on our tongues with approval as Ms Marcus bade us farewell and disappeared around the corner in front of us.  

: 

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.