Walking tour

“ The cyclist or the golf-player, I am told, can hold such intercourse with himself in the intervals of striking the ball or working his machine. But the true pedestrian loves walking because, so far from distracting his mind, it is favourable to the equable and abundant flow of tranquil and half-conscious meditation. Therefore I should be sorry if the pleasures of cycling or any other recreation tended to put out of fashion the habit of the good old walking tour. ”

“ The man who goes upon a walking tour should be open to all the usual interests. He should enjoy the country and enjoy the churches and enjoy the beetles, but also, and as a very important item, he should enjoy the walk. ”

“ I have never met a woman yet whose face did not light up at the thought of a walking tour, and in her heart long to don Rosalind clothes and set forth in search of adventures. We thus had the advantage, in planning our route, of several prettily coiffed heads bending over our maps and guide-books with us. ”

“ A walking tour, for example, is unthinkable without a walking-stick, though the experienced will have the strongest internal doubts whether it is any use, and the walking-stick of all walking-sticks for such a purpose is one cut in the woods, as being the most rough and crooked and inconvenient. Carrying such a staff a man feels himself a thing of the earth. ”

“ Road Tramping or real pedestrianism comprehends short walks as a training for physical well being which, as one becomes experienced, may be lengthened to include an occasional all day country tour as a wise utilization of holidays, or, one who becomes an adept may even plan to spend his annual two weeks’ vacation period in a lengthy walking trip upon some of the better known highways in any civilized section of our country or in our National Parks or as a tourist in foreign lands. ”

“ The roads are certainly far from good, and anything in the shape of a walking tour is out of the question, for the strongest pedestrian would have all his pleasure spoilt by the hard-going of the long, straight causeway. ”

“ The close of the holiday season sets most of us reflecting on the philosophy of travel, and many of us upon the simplest form of it, the philosophy of walking tours. Among serious and imaginative pedestrians there are only two schools or parties, and one school maintains that the pedestrian should go forth without map or compass, and wander until a wood beckons to him or a pathway points like a finger. ”

“ A walking tour. Well. I'm a doctor myself, and unless you get your clothes changed pretty quickly, I predict that your walking tour will come to an abrupt conclusion—even if it's only a temporary one. ”

“ The pedestrian seeks wide horizons, but he seeks more than that. The only classical walk which the writer now recalls, taken in a level region, was Thoreau’s tour along the beaches of Cape Cod; but there was the sea—itself an unending delight and stimulus to imagination—and the sand dunes, with all the beauties of mountain form in miniature.
There are, of course, the great recreation grounds of the world: the Swiss Alps, the Tyrol, and in our own country the Glacier National Park, the Yellowstone, and the Yosemite. Such [72] a place is the pedestrian’s paradise. ”

“ On a one-day excursion, a man will walk unburdened; and, on exceptional longer trips, pack-horses may carry the baggage from one camping ground to another; but, ordinarily, on a tour continuing day after day, one will carry on his own back all that he requires. Should his route lie through settled country, where shelter and bed are to be found in farmhouse or wayside inn, the man will travel with lighter load, and with greater freedom and enjoyment; if he must carry his blanket, too, walking becomes harder work. ”

“ HITTING THE TRAIL WALKING tours are popularly supposed to be feasible chiefly for those to whom this method of travel is incidental to their occupation—timber cruisers, landlookers, prospectors, game wardens and trappers of the North—men who daily match themselves against the forces of Nature. ”

“ It is not given to all alike to be able to appreciate the true pleasure of a country walk. It is a thing that many of us prize, and that even more of us long for. And yet there are some people, really fond of walking, to whom it seems to make little difference whether their road goes evenly along the Queen's highway, and is hemmed in by straight stone walls, or loiters through winding by-ways, under banks crowned with straggling hedge-rows, overhung with sheltering elms. ”

“ When you get into the road, though far from the town, and feel the sand under your feet, it is as if you had reached your own gravel walk. You no longer 240 hear the whip-poor-will, nor regard your shadow, for here you expect a fellow-traveller. You catch yourself walking merely. ”

“ The walks are the unobtrusive connecting thread of other memories, and yet each walk is a little drama in itself, with a definite plot with episodes and catastrophes, according to the requirements of Aristotle; and it is naturally interwoven with all the thoughts, the friendships, and the interests that form the staple of ordinary life.
Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season. ”

“ Occasionally, walking trips, with one or two companions, gave well-deserved vacations—trips from which the walkers returned tired and penniless, but inspired by the beauty of nature in the pleasant French countryside and thrilled with the stupendous grandeur of the Alpine scenery. ”

“ Beneficial as the foregoing may be, the greatest service to the greatest number is afforded by what are prosaically known as ‘local walks.’ On each of two or three Sundays of the month a committee in charge has carefully planned a hike of from eight to twenty miles by road, trail, or beach. As many as two hundred persons have sometimes gone on one of these trips. ”

“ I became an enthusiast in the Alps, but I have found almost equal pleasure in walks such as one described by Cowper, where the view from a summit is bounded, not by Alps or Apennines, but by "a lofty quickset hedge." Walking gives a charm to the most commonplace British scenery. A love of walking not only makes any English county tolerable but seems to make the charm inexhaustible. ”

“ Also by walking, you can escape the loud-mouthed, bull-voiced tourist who bawls out his own shallow knowledge of erosion to the whole carriageful just at the moment you want to float away in fancy amid opal lights and upper heights where the Olympic and Hindoo and Norse gods took refuge when unbelief drove them from their old resorts. ”

“ You may walk by night or by day, in summer or in winter, in fair weather or in foul, in calm or in a gale, and in every case you are doing something native to yourself and going the best way you could go. All men have felt this.
Walking, also from this same natural quality which it has, introduces particular sights to you in their right proportion. A man gets into his motor car, or more likely into somebody else's, and covers a great many miles in a very few hours. ”

“ The Daily Walk. Walking is to be commended, not as a holiday pastime, merely, but as part of the routine of life, in season and out. Particularly to city-dwellers, to men whose occupations are sedentary, is walking to be commended as recreation. Will a man assert himself too busy?—his neighbor plays a game of golf a week ”

“ My traveling afoot, for many years, has been chiefly in busy city streets or in the country roads into which they run—not far from the day’s work [69] or from the thoroughfares of the world’s concerns.
“Of such journeys on foot which I recall with greatest pleasure are some that I have made in the encircling of cities. More than once I have walked around Manhattan Island (an afternoon’s or a day’s adventure within the reach of thousands) , keeping as close as possible to the water’s edge all the way round. ”

“ It makes a splendid promenade, where crowds of well-dressed persons may be seen, on the sultry summer evenings, walking, or seated on the stone benches, enjoying the cool air from the river, until a late hour. ”

“ It is a tour which embraces country widely differing in characteristics—one which takes in both the long, broad, ribbon-like roads of Central France, flanked by meadows, orchards, and farmsteads, and lofty mountains from the peaks of which other peaks capped with glistening snow may be gazed upon, sunlit valleys and sparkling lakes. It is a tour which no man could possibly make without a good machine, and yet it is a tour which, with a good machine, can be considered easy and comparatively inexpensive. ”

“ Those who will turn these pages will be for the most part city folk; the resident of any of our cities may, with the aid of trolley, railway, and steamboat, discover for himself a dozen ten-mile walks in its environs—many of them converging to his home, some macadam paved and so available even in the muddy season, and any one of them possible on a Saturday or a Sunday afternoon. ”

“ I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la Sainte Terre” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer,—a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; ”

“ Walking is an exercise which in our days might replace, more commonly than it does, the rude out-door recreations of former times; and if but a few of the many hundreds who put on their Sunday clothes to lounge the hours away at the corner of a street, would but take a ten miles’ walk out to the country lanes or breezy moorlands, they would find benefit alike to their manhood and morals. ”

“ Such an informal and unusual way of wandering puts you as a rule on a friendly, companionable footing with everybody you meet: people take an interest in your journey, they confide in you and you in them, there is a sort of freemasonry about the road that has its attractions, you seem to belong to the countryside, to be a part and parcel of your surroundings for the time being, in strong contrast with the stranger suddenly arriving by the railway from somewhere far away. He is brought, the driving tourist comes—a distinction with a difference! ”

“ Usually I am an active walker, loving the sense of quick motion and the stir it imparts to both body and mind, but that morning I found myself loitering, looking widely about me, and enjoying the lesser and quieter aspects of nature. It was a fine wooded country in which I found myself, and I soon struck off the beaten road and took to the forest and the fields. In places the ground was almost covered with meadow-rue, like green shadows on the hillsides, not yet in seed, but richly umbrageous. ”

“ Truly the various people that the road-traveller comes in contact with from time to time often dispute interest with the scenery. As Sir Arthur Helps says, “In travel it is remarkable how much more pleasure we obtain from unexpected incidents than from deliberate sight-seeing,” and it certainly appears to me that a driving tour specially{25}
ARTIST AND AUTHOR lends itself to meeting with incidents. ”

“ Of the first one can say nothing—dreams are fragile, intangible. Prospecting the trail—there lies perhaps the greatest of the joys of trail work. It has a suggestion of the thrill of exploration. No one of us but loves still to play explorer. ”

“ For such an excursion little preparation is necessary. In fact a carriage-road ascends within a mile of the superior summit; and from this point the path is one of the easiest I have ever traversed. The value of a pure atmosphere is so well understood by every mountain tourist that he will neglect no opportunity which this thrice-fickle element offers him. ”

“ Road tramping is for those to whom walking appeals yet who do not care to bother with the details incidental to camping. The trip should be so planned that the day’s journey assures a comfortable bed and warm meals at hotels, inns or at ranch homes. This broadens one’s walking opportunities up to the point where civilization and wild nature touch. ”

“ In the course of a day's walk, you see, there is much variance in the mood. From the exhilaration of the start, to the happy phlegm of the arrival, the change is certainly great. As the day goes on, the traveller moves from the one extreme towards the other. He becomes more and more incorporated with the material landscape, and the open-air drunkenness grows upon him with great strides, until he posts along the road, and sees everything about him, as in a cheerful dream. ”

“ If he be wise, the visitor will not exhaust in a single tour of the sun the pleasures yet in store, but, after a fall, try a ravine or a mountain ascent, thus introducing that variety which is the spice of all our pleasures. ”

“ The traveller—foot-sore, feverish, and satiated with glacier and precipice,—lies back in the corner of the diligence, perceiving little more than that the road is winding and hilly, and the country through which it passes, cultivated and tame. ”

“ There is, however, this consolation to the most way-worn traveller, upon the dustiest road, that the path his feet describe is so perfectly symbolical of human life,—now climbing the hills, now descending into the vales. From the summits he beholds the heavens and the horizon, from the vales he looks up to the heights again. ”