1,000 Miles

And that's a lot.

I usually post on Sundays, but I hit 1,000 miles, or 2,000,000 steps, on Monday (today), so I held off this week's post until I hit that mark. Today is day 193, so I got there seven days early.

 Comanche, Montana is an unincorporated community (Montana teaches you an impressive range of descriptions for barely-there places), population 26, that is 997 miles from Cape Flattery, Washington, so I passed through today. When I looked up images of Comanche Montana, I got pages of pictures of this tow-behind pop-up tent. Comanche is the brand, and Montana is the model, so this is like a Toyota Tundra, except it's a Comanche Montana. Price is about $10,000. Nice.

I may not have mentioned yet that, somewhere along the line, I noticed that my phone keeps track of mileage as well as steps, and it credits me with more mileage than I credit myself with my 2,000-steps-per-mile calculation. For example, in March I recorded 364,000 steps, or 182 miles. My phone says I walked almost 188 miles. So if I switched to using my phone for mileage, I could magically jump across several miles of Montana and be a little farther along. I will not do that. I'll stick to my methodology and get my seven million steps in, if the fates allow, but if I do something like this again, I'm using the extra miles my phone wants to give me.

Four days from now, I will pass right through downtown Billings (and yes, Billings is big enough to have a downtown with streets and probably even sidewalks), and then on to the lonely walk between Billings and Broadus, with place names like Crow Agency, Muddy, and Lame Deer. I look forward to finding pictures to represent those places.

I broke my streak of 10,000-step days last Monday. I got more than 9,700 steps but forgot to walk a few more minutes to get the last few. My new streak is seven days. I have only missed four days this year.

One thousand miles is only two-sevenths of the way to Miami. Still, it's one thousand miles of walking. Imagine.