Marjorie Turner Hollman is a writer who loves the outdoors. Link to all Marjorie’s books.
We love riding on rail trails alongside rivers. The Greenbriar rail trail follows the river of the same name, and passes through two tunnels. Seventy-eight miles long, the trail is in great shape, with solid footing, quite level, and is perfect for biking. Walking works great too; you will simply have to take longer to see everything along the way!
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Marjorie Turner Hollman is a writer who loves the outdoors. Link to all Marjorie’s books.
Advice is often handed out like candy–“Just let go, and have a nice day.” Why some think it’s simple is beyond me. Letting go has never been that easy in my own life, for sure! One day I finally began to grasp what was wrong with this advice, or at least, what was missing. Here’s the story: (an excerpt from My Liturgy of Easy Walks: Finding the Sacred in Everyday (and some very strange) Places.
Well-intentioned people offer varied strategies intended to short-circuit the difficult process of “letting go,” whether it be of worries, pain, hurt, relationships, the past in general, or even prolonged grieving. The list of life challenges is endless, and suggestions for how to cope are endless too, yet have been useless in my own experience. I have learned that letting go is something that happens on its own time schedule, not because of trying harder.
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Marjorie Turner Hollman is a writer who loves the outdoors. Link to all Marjorie’s books.
This spring our travels took us south along (basically) the East Coast. We headed to Tennessee by way of Pennsylvania and West Virginia to see grandboys, and then back north, through Virginia on our way home to New England. We were able to bring our adaptive tandem bicycle with us, and although we did not saddle up every day, we got a number of wonderful rides in on some really scenic rail trails. The New River Trail State Park was one of the highlights of our spring sojourn. The packed stone dust rail trail (it follows the path of a former rail bed) is a Virginia linear state park, fifty-seven miles in length. We were impressed by the carefully maintained trail surfaces. Branches and fallen trees had been removed making for a relaxed, enjoyable visit. For much of the ten miles (twenty miles round trip) we traveled we could hear, and often see the river right next to the trail.
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Marjorie Turner Hollman is a writer who loves the outdoors. Link to all Marjorie’s books.
In our travels with our camper, we have found state forests to be a great resource, often providing camp grounds where we had great experiences. Many have trail networks, one state forest we stayed at had a handicapped accessible overlook, and others were simply great spots to stop and enjoy the scenery.
On our way to a rail trail in Connecticut, we stopped by a state forest we spotted along the way and discovered a gem (and access to yet another portion of the same rail trail we had been headed toward). The James L. Goodwin State Forest in Hampton, CT offers multiple options for enjoying the outdoors. The boat ramp allows small craft to enjoy the pond. The Conservation Center, located inside the State Forest, offers education programs. When we looked at Google maps we realized that the Airline Trail passes directly through this same state forest.
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Marjorie Turner Hollman is a writer who loves the outdoors. Link to all Marjorie’s books.
Our family has a story that has been passed down through the generations. The tale, in My Liturgy of Easy Walks: Reclaiming hope in a world turned upside down. describes an encounter my grandfather had with a farmer in Quebec. The farmer had a chicken coop. My grandfather visited the farm, and realized that one side of the chicken coop was constructed from a cherrywood table. As you might expect, the table was in rough shape, sharing company with a number of chickens.
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Our family has been heading to Maine for a number of years, but the pandemic shifted our focus. We have spent a lot of time exploring Acadia National Park and have found Easy Walks at various locations throughout the island. The park’s popularity became a real drawback when we were doing our best to avoid crowds in the worst of the pandemic. We looked toward the northern section of Acadia National Park and discovered that the Schoodic peninsula, and on farther east offered a wide variety of places to explore.
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Marjorie Turner Hollman is a writer who loves the outdoors. Link to all Marjorie’s books.
Blue skies in winter can be deceptively cold. A clear, calm day with no wind is a joy, while a stiff wind can be a real challenge for any outing in these darker months. Our visit to Chase Farm in Lincoln Rhode Island offered a mix of weather. Windy on the wide open fields of this historic town-owned property, and Easy Walking in the sheltered spots tucked here and there along the service roads and mown paths that cut through the fields of this former pasture land.
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Marjorie Turner Hollman is a writer who loves the outdoors. Link to all Marjorie’s books.
In our western travels, a secondary goal to our spending time in Glenwood Canyon on the bike trail that wends its way through the canyon was to explore Carlsbad Caverns while we were in the west. For many reasons, including keeping crowds down through the pandemic, a visit to this National Park for the self-guided tour through the cavern requires reservations. Thus, our relaxed itenerary for this trip suddenly became a push to meet deadlines, dates, and specific times reserved to reach Carlsbad, New Mexico. This not only required excessive amounts of driving, It meant places we would have otherwise enjoyed stopping to explore were mostly by passed because we were pressed for time.
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We had another goal on our travel beside bicycling in Glenwood Canyons, and that was to allow me to take the self-guided tour of Carlsbad Caverns National Park, in Carlsbad, New Mexico. From Utah, that’s a long drive, so we took our time and stopped a few places in between. Not on our schedule, but too good to pass up, was Mesa Verde National Park, which ended up being on our way. We spent two days quite nearby, allowing for more relaxed visiting of the park. We stopped near the end of October, when the park was essentially closing down for the winter, so some aspects of the park we had hoped to enjoy were unavailable to us. What we did see still made the visit worthwhile.
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Marjorie Turner Hollman is a writer who loves the outdoors. Link to all Marjorie’s books.
Traveling out west in the fall is a balancing act when you have a camper. The scenery is even more stunning than at other times of the year, and the risk of freezing weather is increased. Freezing means no running water (I know–a modern luxury of camping in a camper with wheels.) We had been in Colorado and weather reports promised freezing temperatures, yet a few hours west of us in Moab, Utah, the weather was warmer. Thus, an unplanned, but welcome diversion west to Arches National Park was our next stop on our western tour.
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Marjorie Turner Hollman 