Taking A Walk

by Dwayne Phillips

First surprise – it doesn’t seem like almost a year ago that I did my first steps on this walk, but my records show that to be the case. I walked four days widely separated by the calendar as kind of a warm up. This wasn’t so much a physical warm-up, but more a test of equipment and the mental aspect of the trip.

I walked from the house to the intersection of Virginia Highway 28 and the Washington and Old Dominion Trail (this links to the Friends of the W&OD and this links to the Wikipedia article on it). The Friends website is really good as it gives detailed maps marking benches, picnic tables, and bathrooms.

The walk was about five miles and I completed it in two hours. The weather was in the mid 80s.

I walked through the town of Herndon, Virginia. This is next door to my starting town of Reston so there wasn’t much new to see.

Equipment notes:

Don’t wear regular white athletic socks. The skin on the bottoms of my feet felt like they were about to tear.

I wore my new Tilley hat. It works really well at blocking the sun.