Sunday Greenway

By Sunday morning at Hawksbill Cabin, the little border collie can barely contain herself, she wants to get out for a walk and adventure so badly.  So, blessed with a sunny winter morning, she and I decided to take in Luray's Hawksbill Greenway - and better yet, since we had time to spare between errands, we took in the whole 3.5 mile loop.

There are a couple of fun things about this.

First off, the Greenway is the place where Tessie and I first took a long walk and I let her off leash for a little romp.  In fact, it was very near the place with the bees and buttercups painting shown here in the photo.  We obviously go back often, it's such a great asset to the town.

Second, this year I am hoping to keep better track of walks like this.  I've started to track our daily walks and finding it very motivating - we only go about .80 miles and it takes about 20 minutes, but since I have been keeping an eye on it, I'm already trying to figure out how I might add that little bit more to round it out to a mile...and possibly how we might add to the route and make it 1.5 miles someday.

I'm using the Map My Walk app for tracking this activity right now.  We have an initiative at work with challenges, and I am thinking about signing up with a commitment to do 300 miles this year with the dog walks - a stretch would be to take it up to 500 miles; to do that I would add in some hikes in Shenandoah National Park.  That doesn't seem hard to imagine at all, so I'll see what I can do.  In the meantime, Sunday's walk is documented here.

The third and final fun thing about this walk? I stopped to take a look at some of the paintings that people have added along the way.  Luray already has a number of murals around town - some lovely, some whimsical.  The ones on the Greenway have a folk art quality to them because they are often done by scout troops, but I did like the butterfly on the cone flower because of how it reminded me of summer days that are still a long way off.

Soon enough our little walk was over, and we got back to business.  I had some work and errands to take care of...and I needed to make some time to relax on the brick terrace.