Taking A Walk

by Dwayne Phillips

Today was overcast and cool – 53 to 66 degrees F. Perfect for walking. We covered 14 miles of mostly rural and then all city. We went through the wide places in the road of Mauzy, Lacey Spring (not springs), and Melrose before walking through Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Mauzy has a general store that wasn’t open. Melrose has a gas station where we sat on a picnic table outside and drank a cup of coffee (only 61 cents if anyone from Starbucks is reading this!). Lacey Spring has a United States Post Office. So it has some sort of prestige that the other places lack.

Then there is Harrisonburg. This is the biggest city since Winchester with some 40,000 residents. Harrisonburg is large enough that its downtown has some areas that have fallen on hard times and haven’t been revitalized. It isn’t quaint, and I don’t suggest walking Highway 11 end-to-end through Harrisonburg. We didn’t; we drove about a mile through the parts I wasn’t comfortable walking. Those parts are on the north side of the town’s center.

James Madison University is just to the south of the town’s center. JMU has a pleasant campus and atmosphere. It is a state university and hosts some of the kids who live in the Northern Virginia rat race and want to “get away” to attend college. I’m not sure if they want to get away from the rat race or just from their parents – maybe both. Virginia Tech is another such school, one that is 120 miles to the south on our pathway.

Farther south of JMU, Highway 11 in Harrisonburg is just a long and busy street with businesses. All the car dealerships in Rockingham County seem to be here.

Feathers on the side of the road? Oh, yes. North of Harrisonburg we walked ten rural miles. This is the turkey capitol of the U.S. (remember the statue of the turkey yesterday?). Now and then we would see white feathers on both sides of the road. They looked too big for chicken feathers, so my guess is that they are turkey feathers.

Well, not a big sight to see, but it appears that now and then these turkey-hauling trucks encounter something that riles the turkeys and throws some feathers.

A note on health – I never knew that the human body had so many parts that could hurt from walking.

Equipment – add this to the list of essential items: a safety pin for puncturing blisters so the liquid can ooze out. That sounds worse than it is. I strongly advise doing this to blisters a soon as they blister. Even in the middle of the day is a good time for this.

PHOTOS OF BLISTERS WILL NOT BE SHOWN IN THIS BLOG