Thank you so much!

Alas, it's come to an end. When I set out to write this blog, I figured that I would try to get a full year of walking in, completely uninterrupted. My goals were to show that even a busy person can get out and exercise, and that there's a whole wide world out there to see to keep one's mind active and, itself, exercised. Think about it! I saw better than one bird species per day over the course of nine and a half months. To me, that's amazing.

There are other stats that could be garnered about time walked, the number of states in which I took walks, how many strangers exchanged greetings with me (more than two per day!) and more.

But it's time to move on. I've shut down my Twitter account, and Facebook comes next. I spend enough time in front of the computer as it is, and I have a family I want to make even more room for. I'd like to thank everybody who's commented on, perused or even simply enjoyed the pictures of "Thirty Minutes a Day." I hope you can tell that it's been a thoroughly enjoyable experience for me since day one.

Here's to the walking life! Now get out there and enjoy it.

October 15, 2009 - On the Mend

Victory! I made it to the post office. I had to. Today's the deadline for Local Cultural Council grants, and I write them for my full-time job. And, surprisingly, I've been up for eight straight hours. My lungs are still crackly and my breathing still shallow, but the light is there at the end of the tunnel. I hope I get better quickly. There's so much I want to say about foliage.

What else is happening: got my copy of the November issue of Northeast Boating, with my article on sea kayak safety in it.

October 14, 2009 - Still Down for the Count

Each day seems a little less harsh. The hacking, explosive coughing has subsided, and I now feel like a water balloon that's been untied and left to drain itself dry. I've been up for almost four hours, which is a new record for the week. But my lungs are so jammed up that I sound like a lion in wait for prey whenever I breathe more than the slightest breath. I'm downing fluids, and at this point, I just feel like I have a really, really bad cold. I'll take it over what I dealt with on Monday. Today's walk is simply not happening, and I've cleared my schedule through the weekend. As soon as I'm strong enough, I'm guessing a walk will do me some good. As for now, I'm going back to bed.

October 13, 2009 - Nowheresville

I awoke this morning, and that was a good start. Unfortunately, my medication was powerful enough to knock me flat on my ass again. I spent most of the day in bed again, trying to recall obligations for later in the week. I sent a few emails, shared dinner with my wife, and spent a seventh day in a row without hugging my son. It's killing me.

What else happened: finished reading Mark Bowden's The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL.

October 12, 2009 - La La Land

I started feeling sick on Saturday night, had a sore throat all day Sunday, and on Monday morning, I was diagnosed with pneumonia. 'Twasn't rain, nor sleet, nor snow, nor dark of night that stayed this ambler from his self-appointed rounds. Nope, after 287 straight days of walking a new place each day, my streak came to a crashing end. I slept through most of Monday, only waking for occasional moments of delusion and chills. My heart was racing to keep my oxygen levels where they should have been, hindered by lungs so full of fluid they couldn't take in normal breaths, making me beyond tired.

Nope, this was a no-go.

October 11, 2009 - The Boardwalk, Ocean City, Maryland

Breathe, walker boy. Breathe.

Okay. I'm fully for capitalism. I'm certainly for the process of rising from rags to riches and building a fortune that concomitantly helps to build a strong economy. I certainly understand the concept that fortune-seekers will go where they think their fortunes will appear, from the gold rushes out west to the sun-seeking rushes to the beach each summer. But as I rode the bus down through Ocean City - and my destination was at the very end of the community - passing mile after mile after mile of high-rise hotels looming over the sands, of menu-duplicating restaurants, one question repeatedly smacked me on the head:

Who the hell needs to play this much miniature golf?!

Perhaps it's a symbol of aging. When I was a kid, I would have seen the bright lights of the boardwalk and raced for the Skee-ball machines, begged my parents for a $6 hot dog and exhausted myself on fried dough, cotton candy and ferris wheels. But I'm almost forty now.

That may be the root of the problem. I'm not old enough. I can tell you of the ravages of the Blizzard of 1978 and what it did to the Massachusetts coastline. Even though I was only six years old, I saw it firsthand. But I was not there for the 1962 storm that decimated Ocean City, and I suspect that many of the people who have invested so heavily in the city today were not there either. It's now been almost fifty years since that tragedy, and many of the buildings standing today are built on the spots of others that were washed away by the power of nature. No one wants to forecast disaster, be it human or economic, but Ocean City seems to be just one good storm away from having to start all over again. The next time it happens, hopefully the town will put in place new building codes that will lessen the impact of future storms.

But it's a gamble. Somebody making a fortune now is gambling the storm won't come in his lifetime, or in the span of it he's using to make money on the beach. Call me conservative, but I wouldn't take that bet.

Time: 38 minutes.

New species: None.

Stranger hellos: None.

What else is going on: the long ride back home to Massachusetts.

October 10, 2009 - Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, St. Michaels, Maryland

St. Michaels was a diversion for this crowd, no doubt about that. While the U.S. Life-Saving Service was almost ubiquitous on the American coasts in the late 1800s, from Maine to Florida, on the Gulf Coast in Texas, all around the Great Lakes and even with sparse coverage of the Ohio River and the Pacific Coast from San Francisco to Alaska, it never made its way up into Chesapeake Bay.

That amazes me. Part of the reason for the station proliferation was marketing. Some stations' crews never performed heroic rescues. Some of that was due to timing; stations built after 1900 saw a dwindling fraction of the number of old wooden vessels that had historically plied coastal waters for generations and the occasional heavy steam-driven vessel of some kind. Wrecks were fewer and farther between than they had been just a decade earlier.

But Sumner Kimball, the general superintendent of the service, knew that high profile locations like Ocean City, Maryland, and other summertime seashore resorts drew attention to the good work of the service, attention that could lead to voter support through letters to Congressmen, who in the long run could ensure continued funding for the service.

That said, it's amazing there were never any lifesaving stations inside Chesapeake Bay, especially near Washington, D.C.

So that story is not told at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. Instead, one does receive healthy doses of oystering, boatbuilding, crabbing, waterfowling and more. The Hooper Strait Lighthouse stands on the water's edge, complete with a portion of a screwpile, the bottom end of the legs of the famous Bay lighthouses that looked like spiders standing in open water, on display. There are punt guns, a gallery of decoys, boats starting with dugout canoes made by the local Native American tribes, and an experiential Waterman's Wharf designed to let kids pull crab and eel pots from the water. The Bay had a language all its own, from pushboats to hand tongers to crab pickers.

I'm glad we detoured through here.

Time: 131 minutes.

New species: None.

Stranger hellos: 16 (694).

What else is happening: dinner with the whole gang at Fisherman's Wharf in Lewes, Delaware; ran a live auction to raise funds for the association.