Getting started

July 29, 2013

Jim and I want to give ourselves a good boot to become more physically active. Yesterday we watched our niece Beth run in the Tely Ten 10 mile road race in St. John's. She breezed past us at the eight-mile mark. We thought yeah, good for her but we're too old now to start serious running.  Later in the day I discovered that my friend Mary Moylan had participated for the first time in honour of her 70th birthday -- how inspiring is that?

So, we sat at the cute little coffee shop by the war memorial in town and thought about setting a realistic goal that might encourage us to get moving. As we munched our pastries we considered various options for a project that would keep us going over a period of weeks or months. We remembered the winter of 1995 when we decided to ski from our then-home in St. John's to our summer home in Holyrood via the T'railway. Each weekend we would select a segment of trail, drive to a starting point, ski until we were half as tired as we wanted to get, then retrace our path back to the car. In other words, each piece of the trail would be double-tracked.  All went well until Jim suddenly got sent for hernia surgery. Then, just as suddenly, we moved away and forgot all about doing the trail.

Well, this could be just the modest undertaking to get us moving. Holyrood is now our home, so we would start from there and hike to the Railway Transportation Museum, the old rail terminal in St. John's. I won't mislead anyone by claiming this will be a herculean feat. The distance is only about 50 km. I have friends who used to walk the entire distance by road annually in the Peggy Lewis Memorial Walk.  Instead of doing it in one 12-hour day we plan to take 10 days to do 10 segments. The ten days will be spread over the next few months. We are beginning at the western end of Holyrood and will walk through the long linear town of Conception Bay South, through strips of Paradise and Mount Pearl and into the west end of St. John's.

We plan to be away from home for two to three weeks in August and another week in September so that will interfere. We are fair-weather hikers so won't go just any day. But it should be fun to see where the trail takes us and we will document the trek and take pictures all along the way. Telling everyone our plan should also shame us into completing the journey.

The route map is shown here on the Trans Canada Trail website.