Observations from the Week of Walking Everywhere

The "Week of Walking Everywhere" exercise is drawing to a close, and I wanted to fill folks in on how it went.

It helps if you play this in the background https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AzEY6ZqkuE

(1) I live a fair distance from town, and am required to be in the downtown area at least once a day.  So the effort to walk back and forth was substantial but certainly not overwhelming (I haven't worn my feet down to bloody stumps).  I decided to assign myself this challenge for two reasons - because I was getting lazy, and because I wanted to do the very minimum towards reducing fossil fuel emissions while still being able to lord it over others.

(2) I became much more efficient about how I planned out my schedule.  When you have a car and a full tank of gas, you find excuses to run an errand at the drop of a hat, often very inefficiently.  Initially, I was walking back and forth twice a day, because I was behaving like I would if I were still driving except without the car, but I quickly found ways to reduce that nonsense.

(3) I walked into town along Moraine around 8:00 each morning, and returning home along Moraine around 8:30 or later each night (town board meeting ran long).  There were very few people I saw doing the same thing (a couple of runners, a couple of people out walking their dogs, a couple sets of footprints that weren't produced by my shoes in the snow), and we all know Moraine is not conducive to pedestrians, so I'm not going to complain about that.  I can complain about the depressing amount of trash alongside the road (I don't litter, and can't for the life of me figure out why other people do), and the high rate of speed people decide to engage in on this road.  I could tell just from the Doppler shift of tires on pavement as cars approached and then passed that most cars were going well over the posted speed limit.  This is another thing a car does, it gives people the freedom to think they are really being efficient by getting someplace seconds faster than if they were driving at the speed limit, thus allowing them these extra seconds to watch more of the Nuggets game, or wherever they need to get at 9:00 p.m. at night when nothing it open at that end of town.  However, I did find myself looking a lot at my watch, because walking is not a fast activity, and gives you a lot of time to wish you were driving.

(4) Cracking through the whitish plates of ice atop small puddles is just as fun as an adult as when you were 7 years old.

(5) Some derelict-looking sport camper has been parked along Riverside in the lot near Komito boots the entire time, and likely the week before.  If pressed, I might cop to it changing to an adjacent parking spot once during this time, but it is clearly in violation of overnight parking rules, if we have or enforce such things.  In contract, a pretty swell mountain bike was resting against some tree trimmings early in the week near Brynwood (I saw it at least two consecutive days) and then disappeared.  My guess is, it was stolen, rather than recovered by the owner.  Where I grew up, you could have abandoned a bike for days along the sidewalk and it would have remained there.  Those days don't exist anywhere anymore.

(6) The best part of Estes Park, and I think the reason many people move up here and continue to live here, is the incredible stillness at night.  Most of this week was moving towards a full moon, with evenings of gentle snow, and other evenings of piercingly bright stars.  This stillness was interrupted about every 10 seconds by another car, and me worried about getting farther off the shoulder.  WTF is open or going on at 9:30 p.m. along Moraine Avenue that people besides Domino's delivery need to be driving there?  

(7) I sleep just fine, but this past week I've slept even better, generally throughout the night.  I'm not saying walking everywhere does this (it may be my increased salt intake from Safeway slashing prices on all Nabisco products), but it obviously didn't have the opposite effect.

(8) When people I knew found out I was doing this, they offered me rides (which was kind but of course they knew and I knew I couldn't accept them) but it is interesting to see how no people in cars in Colorado even offer rides to walkers in bad weather conditions.  Where I used to live, which was a different tourist town, everybody offered rides to everyone else, townies to tourists, tourists to complete strangers.  The town before that, which rained a lot, if you didn't have an umbrella and were caught walking in a pouring rain, it was mere seconds before the first car offered a ride.  I'm not saying Colorado is unfriendly, but I've been pulled off on the shoulder of the Big Thompson Canyon changing a flat tire before, and no one stopped or even slowed down to offer assistance.  I think we tend to treat people walking in Estes Park as poor, and wish they were at least on a bike, so we could complain about having to drive around them on the narrow portions of the road.