Something Between Nowhere and Hardly Anywhere

January 17, 2009. Urban walk from home to Tanglewood Cinema and back. About 6 miles.

With the forecast showing windy high in the 20s for Saturday and a high in the 30s with rain or snow on Sunday, The Day Hiker advocated for something between nowhere and hardly anywhere for a weekend walk. (She is of course The Greatest Day Hiker Of Them All once she is going, but can occasionally be reluctant to take that all-important first step.)

With a trio of strong lures – lunch in a warm restaurant instead of the usual mountain-top windswept rock, a Clint Eastwood movie and popcorn – she agreed to an urban walk with woodsy touches.

For the first mile and a half – neighborhoodish with sidewalks – we had puppydawg Cookie along, on her way to the sitter's (son Adam's house). From there, we set out eastward and over as close a thing to a mountain as there is in this part of the city – the high, water-tower-topped rise between Brambleton and Colonial Avenues. We tried to name the "mountain," but didn't come to anything we were pleased with. The Day Hiker wondered aloud and with full irony as we climbed, how in the heck we had forgotten our hiking poles. The encouraging sign up there: New signs announcing that the trail goes this way or that; and it is indeed a trail, ducking through the woods and then heading down toward Colonial.

Across Colonial and parallel to Ogden Road, we found an unsigned trail, new to us and likely the work of the neighborhood's children, as it glides and twists down through the woods toward what we had not known before were the headwaters of Murray Run. The trek from there to Tanglewood Mall takes you through a cluster of condos and then down the hill to parallel the railroad tracks back to the movie house. With time tight, we settled for Applebee's for lunch – a place where neither of had been, but enjoyed just fine.

The popcorn was good too, and Clint Eastwood as retired Detroit auto worker Walt Kowalski was even better – crusty, acerbic, squinty-eyed and in the end, soft-hearted as could be.

The walk back, with Cookie being delivered, was the route we usually take for this walk: Along pretty, tree-line Winding Way Road, through the Virginia Western arboretum, across Colonial and onto the Murray Run Greenway and on back into our well-sidewalked neighborhood.

On a day when it was delightfully clear that the days are indeed getting longer, we were back home before the sun went down.