Apr 30--Smoky Mountains

I started off today with my 50 flights of stairs at the hotel and bear crawling the hallway.  Here's today's stairwell.  This gets a 3-star rating which is good.  The decor was reasonably nice, but the air was a bit stale.  However, some people use the stairs to go down for breakfast, so it did get a little fresh air from the doors opening occasionally.

At a few of our rest stops, Marilyn was shopping so I walked around outside.  Then we were fortunate to be able to hike at our destination, the Smoky Mountains.  Yippee!   We went to Laurel Falls.  It's a 2.6 mile hike but I logged about 4 because I scrambled around and went back and forth while Marilyn took lots of pictures.  So it was a good walking day.

Here I am coming back down the trail to say hi while she's photographing:

I don't know what kind of lizard this is, but it's pretty.

The mountains, yea!

Big ole' millipede (I think).  I showed my shoe and a phamphlet for scale.

The falls.

It was a good day for walking, considering it was also a longish driving day!   My fitbit logged 17,853 steps.

Apr. 29

I’m traveling and there’s not usually many walking opportunities at my hotel besides the treadmill which I don’t enjoy so much.  What I don’t mind for some reason is climbing the stairwells and bear crawling the hallways, ha.  So this morning I climbed 50 flights of stairs.  I've done this enough times that I've started giving ratings to the stairwells.  This one was 4 star, which is quite high.  The reason it got a high rating was that the doors were open on each floor so the air was fresh.  This is a rarity in hotel stairwells.  5 star would include windows, another rarity.  Here is the beautiful scenery of today's stairwell:

And here was the scenery in the hallway:

I crawled forwards and backwards and sideways.

Then we got an extra bonus at the end of the day!   We arrived at our destination a little early, and the forecast thunderstorms went north of us, and we googled to see if there were parks nearby, and there was a fabulous park with every kind of activity you could imagine only about a 10 minute drive away.  So we walked about 3-4 miles in a beautiful setting with lots of woods, birds, trees, hills.  It was lovely and unexpected.  We are going to start searching out more opportunities like this on our driving days.  Here are some pictures from the hike:

April 28, 2017, Today's walk

I walked to the Dentist and back, about 4 miles round-trip.  And no cavities, whew.  There were lots of flowering trees.  This one had a nice combination of pretty flowers and leaves:

Then I walked with Marilyn for 2 miles.

Yearlong Challenge

I don't have much time to post right now, but I want to walk or do stairs every day for a year.  I've been walking every morning lately and it's been really enjoyable.  It seems to have the benefits of both exercise and meditation.  I want to do this every day.  However, it may not be possible, especially when we travel.  But when we travel I can always do stair climbing in the hotel.  So that can be my backup.  Here are my goals:

1. walk at least 3 miles at once if possible.  There's something about going for an hour at least that resets my brain and makes me happy.   
2. walk more during the day if possible.
3. walk within an hour of waking up, if possible.  Something about that morning walk makes me happy all day long.
4. if you can't walk in the morning, start the day with 50 flights of steps.   Then try to get a walk in later in the day, or more stair climbing
5. do other exercise if possible later in the day:  e.g., body work, biking or yoga.
6. when you can, take a picture and log it here with a note.