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Nadine Walks

stories of trekking and travel

January Recap: A Long Winter, In My Nest

January 31, 2021

Last month I read Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham (a fictional account of what might have happened to Hillary Clinton had she not married Bill), and in it the author describes how Hillary would create her ‘nest’ each night: burrowed into her bed, robe and tea, surrounded by blankets and pillows and a tower of books and notebooks. She would study here, read here, research here, plan here. I’m not sure whether this is actually true or not, but I like to think that it is, as I sit here in my own nest, my winter nest.

I’ve often talked of how I like to write in my kitchen, next to a little heater, my toes hooked around the rungs of an opposite chair. But sometimes, especially in the winter, I’ll retreat back to my bedroom as soon as the sun goes down. I spread out layers of blankets and prop myself up against a stack of pillows, make a mug of tea or hot chocolate or pour myself an icy glass of seltzer water, and settle in with my computer.

It feels warms here, hidden away in the back of my apartment, across from a window that faces nothing but trees. It’s where I am right now- a winter afternoon at the very end of January, where outside the snow has started falling (this could be a big storm!) and I’m here tucked away, with nowhere I need to go, nowhere I need to be.

winter creek

Outside of my working and walking hours, this is probably where you could have found me this month, buried in my winter nest: tinkering away on my Camino videos, watching episodes of Game of Thrones and eating dark chocolate caramels. There are worse ways to spend a Pandemic January, for sure. In fact, in many ways, this month wasn’t all that bad. Certainly better than I’d expected it to be.

I could probably end this post right here, having already mentioned the main highlights of the month: making Camino videos, watching Game of Thrones. But here are a few more things!

Movement

I walked a lot this month. Maybe because it was the start of a new year and I felt recommitted to moving and walking and hiking. I squeezed in the walks where I could, nearly always a short one in the morning before work, a longer one after work, always walking with the sunrise and the sunset. These were the usual, neighborhood loops, and lately I’ve started to wonder what my neighbors must think of me. “There she goes again,” they might say. “The lady who walks.” But by now I’ve met a lot of these neighbors, and the small interactions always add a perk to my step. There’s Bill who walks in the sanctuary, who proudly told me that he recently celebrated his 90th birthday. And Steve, who was driving by and rolled down his window so we could chat about the vaccine, and the attack on the Capitol. And a new (to me) neighbor, who was heading down the street to check out a fallen tree (this is a somewhat common thing in my neighborhood), and who urged me to join the tennis club this summer. Mary, and Sue, and the man who jogs in a Santa hat, and all of the dogs who run over to greet me.

I met up with a few friends for quick walks and small hikes this month; the temperatures were cold, but it’s the only way I feel comfortable seeing anyone these days. And honestly? On a sunny day and with a brisk pace, the cold doesn’t bother me too much (and wearing a face mask helps!). I walked around Potts Meadow and past the Wyeth Studios on the Harvey Run Trail, and explored a quiet trail in Green Lane Park. Not adventurous stuff, but my local winter landscapes are full of such quiet, soft beauty.

Green Lane Park, Montgomery County PA

Pennsylvania barn in winter

I also started doing yoga again this month! I’ve never consistently practiced yoga, but there was a year or two (a rather long time ago, now) that I took some classes and practiced just a bit on my own. A friend has been doing Yoga With Adriene during the pandemic, and encouraged me to check out her month-long January ‘journey’, so I did. I made it halfway through the month and then stopped, but even just those two weeks were great. It reminded me that I have an awful lot of muscles that I don’t use much, that my body could really benefit from the stretching, that it’s a nice way to slow down in the evenings. I’d like to try to incorporate a bit of yoga into my days again, even just once or twice a week.

Creating

I didn’t do a ton of writing this month- my focus was on creating YouTube videos, more on that below- but I did manage to continue my habit of posting one personal-essay a month to my Patreon site (these are essays available only to my patrons, who pledge a dollar-amount per month). This month’s was about what it was like to walk through a heatwave on the Camino Aragonés. It was good timing for that essay, too, because it went along nicely with some of the footage in Pt 2 of my Camino Aragonés series on YouTube.

Ahh, the YouTube videos. I wrote about it here, and I know I said it in that post but I can’t help but say it again: making these videos has been a lot of fun. There’s something really energizing about learning a new skill, practicing, getting better, making something. I posted two videos that cover my walk on the Aragonés, and now I’ve moved on to working on footage from the Norte. I wish- so much- that I had taken more videos while I walked. But learning the process has been great, and it’s filling my head with ideas of the kinds of videos I might be able to make in the future. Now, I just have to be allowed back into Spain to actually go on another walk, and at this point who knows when that will be…

Face in the woods

The Small Stuff, the Big Stuff

Game of Thrones is getting me through the winter. So is freshly baked bread, and London Fogs from a local coffee shop. Thick, warm, polar bear socks that I put on immediately after I come in from my walk. On so many days I wish I could be working from the safety of my home, but getting to work with some students in-person is revitalizing.

And then, the even bigger stuff: my grandmother turning 102. A new president. My first vaccine shot.

first vaccine shot

***

Some days feel hard, the cold is endless, the clouds are thick, summer seems a lifetime away and what will it be like then, anyway? Will it be another summer in the US, without a long walk, without a Camino, dreaming and dreaming of an open, safe world? Maybe. In the meantime, I’ll walk, and write, and edit videos, and eat caramels and sink into the world of Westeros, and carry on with my work, and drink hot tea, and hold onto moments of beauty wherever I can find them.

streetlamp, winter dusk

1 Comment / Filed In: Writing
Tagged: COVID, hiking, Pennsylvania hiking, walking, winter

Secret Passageways and Hidden Trails; New Adventures in Hiking (and upcoming travel news!)

February 27, 2017

Last week, I discovered a secret passageway in my park.

Well, that’s not exactly true, this “secret passageway” was actually just a short stretch of trail that led off of the main trail that I was already on. But it felt like a secret.

Secret trail, Tyler Arboretum, Philadelphia PA

Had it always been there? Probably. I’ve been hiking in Ridley Creek State Park for a solid three years now, ever since I was preparing for my first Camino. I hiked in the park before that, too, but not as consistently. I love that I have a park only 20 minutes from where I live that offers up a nice selection of wooded trails. I can mix and match them so that I’m often walking a slightly different variation than my last hike. There are some hills, there are flat stretches, there’s a creek, there are lots of deer and sometimes I even see fox cubs (well, that only happened once, but it was great).

Lately though, something has been happening on my hikes: I’m getting a little bored. It was bound to happen after three years of steady hiking. I know the park like the back of my hand, I know where I am at any given moment, and I often help people who are stopped on the trail with their heads bent over a map. I like that my hikes are known and predictable, that I can glide along and let my mind wander without worrying that I’m getting off course.

But that feeling of curiosity and exploration has been lacking for awhile now. Often, I’ll be about halfway through my hike and mentally run through the rest of the trail, trying to guess how long it will take me until I arrive back at my car. My eyes aren’t picking up on all of the details because I’ve been walking on the same path a hundred times, maybe more. I’m starting to feel like I’m on auto-pilot when I hike.

Trail in Ridley Creek State Park, PA

This isn’t a problem, exactly, and hiking is still one of my favorite things to do, even if it’s on a trail that I could hike in my sleep. But this is precisely the wrong time to be getting a little bored with my hikes, because I need to get out to that park now more than ever.

And that’s because I’m in training mode again, for a quick springtime trip to England! I’ll be walking along Hadrian’s Wall, an 84-mile trail that runs from the east coast of England across to the west coast. (Something that delighted me about walking the Camino de Santiago was that I could say I walked across an entire country. If I complete Hadrian’s Way, I’ll be able to say it again).

I’ll write more about this trip in upcoming posts- and certainly when I’m on the trip or just after I return- but for now I just have to say that I’m excited. I really went back and forth over whether I wanted to plan a trip like this: squeeze a walk across a country into my spring break week, at a time of the year when the north of England has lots of potential for cold temperatures and constant rain.

But flight deals were good and one of the deciding factors was that a friend of mine was interested in joining me. This makes it a different kind of experience for me- to not be entirely on my own- but it has its benefits. My friend is an experienced hiker and she mentioned that she likes walking alone, so it’s possible that we might be a good match for something like this.

We’re going to try to fit the walk into 5-days, which should be doable but I suspect that I might go into this thing a little out of shape. The winter hasn’t been a hard one, but I always slow down when the days are short and cold, and I just haven’t been getting outside much.

And this brings us back to hiking in my park, and the secret passageway I discovered last week.

It was a brilliantly warm and sunny day. Everyone had the same idea: to soak up the good weather and go out for a hike. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the trails as crowded as I did last weekend, and I was missing the normal solitude and quiet of my hikes through Ridley Creek. I was walking along on the yellow trail when I turned a corner and saw a family of four ahead of me on the path: parents and two young children and they were laughing and squealing and running around and waving sticks.

“I wish I could put a little distance between us,” I thought to myself.

I slowed down, debating on whether to walk quickly to overtake them, or to stop for a break and let them move ahead. And this was when I glanced down and saw the secret path.

It was clearly a path- small and narrow but leading sharply to the right, away from the yellow trail.

“Maybe I’ll just take this to see where it goes,” I said. I thought that maybe I’d seen this side trail before, but I always figured that it didn’t really lead anywhere. I was in an area of the park that was right at the edge of the trail map, right at the edge of Ridley Creek State Park. There wasn’t supposed to be anything much beyond the boundary of the yellow trail, right?

The side trail was short, maybe only 30 feet, but as soon I cleared a few tall trees I was spit out onto another trail that ran parallel to the one I had just been on. Cleanly painted red and white blazes marked the trees, and the path was wide and well-maintained.

Blazes on tree, Tyler Arboretum, PA

What had I stumbled into? It was like another world over there, some kind of fantasy: a secret garden, a door at the back of a wardrobe that opens onto a magical land.

I wandered down the quiet trail, not another person in sight, and soon the trail split and I saw blue blazes, orange blazes.

For a few minutes I did wonder if I might be going a little crazy, if this alternate-park really did, in fact, exist, if I hadn’t just conjured it up. But then I passed a woman with a dog, and a little white later I saw a faded sign that told me I was hiking on the trails in Tyler Arboretum.

Ahh. The Arboretum has 650-acres of grounds that includes- unbeknownst to me until that day- a network of hiking trails. I’d known that the Arboretum was close to the park, but I never realized that I could get from one into the other. I’m still not sure that I’m supposed to be crossing over to the Arboretum from the park (there’s a fee to get into the grounds of the Arboretum, but I should probably hike down to the Visitor’s Center to find out more), and I’m still learning the lay of the land, how many trails there are, how they all connect.

Creek in Tyler Arboretum, PA

But I have to tell you, discovering this passageway was just what I needed. It’s new and unknown and there’s so much to see and explore. One of the trails is 8-miles long, twice the length of the longest in Ridley Creek, so this is the perfect spot to do some training for my upcoming trip. I have renewed excitement about going out for a hike, it’s a reminder of how important it is to go to new places, discover new paths.

Oh, I can’t wait to discover new paths. Paths close to home, and paths further from home. I have a feeling that this year will be full of them.

Path through Tyler Arboretum, PA

6 Comments / Filed In: Travel, walking
Tagged: England, Hadrian's Wall Way, hiking, journey, path, Pennsylvania hiking, Philadelphia hiking, Ridley Creek State Park, solo-female travel, trail, travel, Tyler Arboretum, walking

Welcome! I’m Nadine: a traveler, a pilgrim, a walker, a writer, a coffee drinker. This is where I share my stories, my thoughts and my walks. I hope you enjoy the site!
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