With snow on the ground, the Blue Ridge Parkway closed and worries about the cold, we bundled up good and set out from the house on this blustery day, headed out of our neighborhood, onto the largely empty Roanoke River Greenway and then into an also-pretty-empty downtown Roanoke.
One cool aspect besides the weather was that I remembered the seldom-used Garmin distance-measurer for precise mileage readings when there are no trail/distance signs.
We learned that walking to the downtown Macado’s restaurant for lunch – where neither of us had been for as long as we could remember – is 4.7 miles via Memorial Avenue to the greenway and along Jefferson Street, and only 2.8 via the nearly crow-fly route along Church Avenue, over to Elm and back to Memorial.
We do always like a shorter walk after lunch than before, but this – especially with the daggone restaurant meal – left a little guilty feeling as we approached the house in less than an hour after we’d left the warm dining room we had to ourselves. Well, I felt that way anyway… I think The Day Hiker was mostly glad to be out of the urban cold.
Urban walk from home, along Roanoke River Greenway and into downtown Roanoke and back. 7.5 miles.
December 5, 2010
