Jigsaw Puzzles

I assemble a jigsaw puzzle every year, a nice big one, usually 5,000 pieces. They take a long time - this year's was a picture of the Sistine Chapel ceiling which I started in February and finished in late September.

And I try to justify this unproductive use of time by thinking of a puzzle as a long-term project that demonstrates that you can achieve many things if you just do a little day after day and don't quit. Put up shelves and get that room in the garage ready. Weed around the lawn and put down bark. Learn to cook.

 An example that occurred to me is that you could walk across the United States if you wanted to; if you can walk ten miles every day, then you can just keep walking until you reach the end of the road, presumably at either the Pacific or Atlantic Ocean. You would get across in less than a year.

And then I realized, I could actually do that if I wanted to, sort of. I don't really want to deal with the logistics - being outdoors, walking next to cars, having to find a place to stay each night, arranging for food and water. So I decide that I could do the walk virtually, in a way: map out a route, then keep track of my steps and track my progress as if I were walking the route. For example, once I have taken 100,000 steps, I will be 50 miles from where I started (2,000 steps ~ one mile.)

Big jigsaw puzzles really are like that - you sit down for an hour and sometimes put maybe 25 pieces together, and it looks and feels like you have not made any progress, but you have. Eventually, small increments will get you there.

Since I live in Washington State, I chose to start my trip at Cape Flattery, the northwest corner of the state and of the United States. I chose Miami for the endpoint, because why take the shortest route when you can walk north to south as well as west to east? Then I plugged it into Google and selected walking as my mode of travel. The entire walk is 3,491 miles per Google, so round to 3,500 miles. That's seven million steps. No problem.

Next, I needed a timeframe and a distance-per-day goal. Ten miles is too far; I doubt that I can walk that far consistently (maybe not even once), and that would mean over three hours of walking each day. I don't have that much time. So, after a bit of fine-tuning and discussing my goal with Jackie, I settled on 10,000 steps per day for 700 days.

I started on October 1, the day before I went on a cruise. A cruise is a good place to walk, but not such a good place to set a routine. So blame that or blame me, but I am already 15,000 steps behind the pace (although that is far ahead of my pace for any month so far this year.) But I figure I have to walk an extra 20 steps or so each of the remaining 690 days to make that up, so it's not really a big deal.

The fun part of this is definitely going to be tracking my progress on the map and seeing where Google sends me. Google decided that the first part of my journey will be to cross the northern end of the Olympic Peninsula, crossing east through Port Angeles and Port Townsend. At Port Townsend, I will take a ferry to Whidbey Island, then walk across the island to another ferry terminal, then take the ferry to Everett on the mainland.

After one week, I had walked far enough to pass Clallam Bay, Washington, on the way to Port Angeles. By the end of week two, I will not even make it to Port Angeles, which, if you know that area, gives you some idea of how slow my progress is versus how far I have to go. Even making it to Oregon seems like a real stretch.

But I think I will make it.