The Adventure Continues, Part 4

After yesterday’s disappointment—following the wrong trail, losing ground and precious time—we left the Congdon shelter hopeful that we could make up for it all on our third day on the Long Trail. For the second day in a row, the sun brightened our mood and the forecast looked promising. We…

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The Adventure Continues, part 3

Aside from a swollen left hand, Day 2 dawned with an air of hopefulness. My sister and I were about 10 miles into our planned 273-mile adventure on Vermont’s Long Trail—the footpath in the wilderness. The previous two Pastor’s Page installments cover the months of preparation up to the actual…

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The Adventure Begins…Finally, pt. 2

After years of dreaming, months of planning, miles of driving, and an almost 4-mile climb up the Pine Cobble Trail, I finally stood in front of the iconic “Welcome to the Vermont Long Trail” sign. (If you missed last week’s beginning of this adventure, you can read it here: The…

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The Adventure Begins…Finally!

I can’t recall becoming seriously interested in backpacking, but 7 or 8 years ago, I got it in my head that I’d like to hike the Long Trail in Vermont—a 273-mile trail up the spine of Vermont, through the Green Mountains, bordered by the Massachusetts state line in the south…

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The Spring Fling Trail Challenge

365 miles in 12 months. On foot. On a trail of some kind (not neighborhood sidewalks or the mall). “The Hiker’s 365,” it’s called, and was the first My Adventure Challenge we signed up for. Initially, we launched this challenge in November 2021 with the goal of completing it one…

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Timber the Shepherd, pt. 2

“Spite. It’s all because of spite,” he said. “He” is the trainer hired to try instilling some discipline in our German Shepherd, Timber. [In case you missed it, I wrote about some of the discipline problems in the previous post.] The trainer explained that German Shepherds resent being left alone,…

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Timber the Shepherd

How the cycle began, I don’t recall, but over a several-month period, our 9-year-old grandson frequently asked me the same thing. “Tell me a story about Timber, Pa!” In my youth, Timber was our pet German Shepherd, a bona fide descendant of Rin Tin Tin, full name of “Baron Timber…

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