I enjoyed this book by David Ryan. He lives in New Mexico and does volunteer work finding archaeological sites for the US Bureau of Land Management. So it is not surprising the book starts out with tales of his wanderings in his local area, finding important sites and artifacts including a Folsom Man arrowhead dating back 10,000 years. By the end of the chapter I was convinced his ideas about wandering would be great in a fascinating area like this.
But what about a more urban area? He answers that in the next chapter by describing a trip to Los Angeles, more famous for freeways than wandering on foot. But on a visit there he finds a theme. Back before cars were king, The LA area was served by an interurban transit system with the nickname “the big red cars”. It turns out a lot of stairways were put in in hilly areas to give access to transit stops. The transit system is gone, a lot of the lines buried under city streets. But many of the stairways remain. So he made it his mission to find as many as possible on foot during a visit, and found not only the stairways but a lot of interesting sites near them. The book continues on like this, describing various areas around the US. And it is not all on foot, he also shows how to spice up road trips in a car this way.
It always helps to have a theme for the adventure. An obvious one for me would be rail-trails. In the US we have converted thousands of miles of abandoned railroads to trail systems which function as linear parks and are great for walking and biking. I have visited all of the ones in my local area, but there are many further afield in California that could add interest to visits to other cities. And I would definitely like to make this a priority when visiting other parts of the US.
David also has a website with resources and tales of his more recent adventures.
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