American Discovery Trail: Bridge Break

This is a very good hand

There is not so much to see this week on the trail, and I will not finish another milestone, so I will write a bit about the pursuit that has been consuming a lot of my time lately: playing bridge.

Regarding the walking though, I just checked a projection for when I might finish, and at a fairly aggressive pace of 140 miles per month, I am 28 months from the endline at Point Reyes. So, this will take a while, and meanwhile, I will be happy with hitting milestones along the way.

In January 2023, I joined the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) and began playing for master points, which are given out in ACBL-sanctioned games, if you win or place. ACBL has its own quest for players - it is called Life Master. Like my trek across America, the quest for Life Master is a years-long pursuit with milestones along the way that are not really significant achievements on their own, but they are steps on the way to getting the whole thing done. I have already passed Junior Master, Club Master, and Sectional Master, with Regional Master in my sights before year-end.

To get the Life Master designation, you need:

At least 500 masterpoints

75 of the 500 have to be black (Black points are no problem - I will have 75 sometime this summer.) Black points are awarded for club games - all other colors come from tournaments.

75 have to be silver. I have 8.82.

50 have to be gold; I have 0.16. The gold requirement will probably be the toughest to achieve.

100 have to be gold or red. So you can have 100 gold and no red, or 50 gold and 50 red, or anywhere in between. Gold points are harder to get than red. I have just over one red point right now.

Along those lines, I have played at three tournaments so far this year, and I will be playing in two more during the next two weekends. That means I have six days coming up when I will not be counting my steps, so my bridge pursuit gets in the way of my walking pursuit sometimes.

In my quest for Life Master - and yes, I am on that quest - I am making good progress. Last year I got 40 points - a lot, really quite a lot for someone just getting started. For points in club play, I was first in Washington State for anyone starting with 0-5 points. This year I am second in Washington in the same race for people starting with 20-50 points, and I have over 30 points total for the year already. You can see though that it will take a long time to get to 500 points - at least five more years most likely.

I have a few good regular partners now, something I was lacking most of last year. They include a relatively new, very good partner with whom I will play in a tournament Friday. A couple of weeks from now, I will have results from two more tournaments and maybe a better idea of where all of this is headed.

 

American Discovery Trail: Long Lick Road

 

Little Smokies, Ohio

Photo credit: Ian Adams Photography

This week I finished the sixteenth segment of the trail, which ends at Long Lick Road. Who names these places? Anyway, after having walked all the way to the southern border of Ohio from close to Columbus, I now am south of Cincinatti and have to walk back north a ways as well as west, always west, long ways to go west still.

As promised last week, I passed two million steps and nine hundred miles this week. As I consider the 8.7 million steps remaining on this hike, two million seems like I am barely started, but to put it in some perspective, if I had walked toward San Francisco from my house instead of taking my current route, I would be past it and almost to Monterey. That's a lot of walking.

This month, I have averaged over five miles per day, or 11,000 steps, which is better than most previous months. This is because the weather is better and the evenings are lighter, and so I have started taking Arlo on longer evening walks than I did during the cold dark months.

This part of Ohio is called the "Little Smokies," because it looks similar to the Great Smokies, so they say, though the mountains are not as tall.

Unsurprisingly, when you look for images of "Long Lick," you get a variety of pictures. I blame the French.

The Counterfeit House. The house was built in 1840 and could be seen from the Ohio River. Riverboat captains received signals from the house regarding the availability of counterfeit bills and coins.

American Discovery Trail: 1.999 Million Steps

 

I will pass two million steps sometime tomorrow morning, as I am just a few hundred steps short, and a little later will reach 900 miles walked, as that milestone is very close as well. Currently I am on the sixteenth segment of the American Discovery Trail, headed straight south toward the Ohio River, and in two days I should be within a mile of it. From there, it appears that I will follow the river, which is the southern border of Ohio, west almost all the way to Indiana.

The first sight this week is the Wickerham Tavern, a stop for runaway slaves on the Underground Railway.

The route takes us through Davis Memorial State Nature Preserve, home of dolomite cliffs and rock towers. I included a picture of each. I am going to call this one the cliffs.

And this one looks like a rock tower. Dolomite is a sedimentary rock made up of nearly equal amounts of calcium and magnesium. So says the Internet.

American Discovery Trail: Sinking Spring, Ohio

This week we are near Sinking Spring, Ohio, in the south of the state, and from here we are headed south and actually east a bit until we get close to the Ohio River and the border with Kentucky, at which point we will turn west and roughly follow the river.

The first sight on our walk this week is the Fort Hill State Memorial and Nature Preserve, site of a 48-acre prehistoric Indian earthwork, pictured here and thought to have been built by Hopewell Indians. The hill in the picture is the actual Indian mound, so you can see it is quite large.

Not far from Fort Hill is this serpent mound, the largest one in the world. It is only three feet high, but 1,348 feet long, and it is over 2,100 years old, although it was rebuilt or repaired maybe 900 years ago. It looks to me as though you can walk on a path around it, and I want to do that one day, if I find myself in the area.

I am walking now to the town of Marble Furnace, which is a nice name, but unfortunately the Internet pictures of Marble Furnace are not much to see, so this is a picture of Mount Thor in Nunavut, Canada.

Nunavut is a Canadian province north of Manitoba and Quebec, mostly north of Hudson Bay, with about half of its territory north of the northernmost point in Alaska. It's way north.

With just under 37,000 people in a land area close to the size of Mexico, it is the least populated major area on earth other than Antarctica, even less densely populated than Greenland. I do not think that I will ever go there, but it looks wild and impressive.

Tomorrow, I will be halfway across Ohio, as the trail runs. It looks like I entered the state two months ago, on February 7, so chances are I will finally get to Indiana two months from now, in early June.
 

American Discovery Trail: Still in Ohio

 

This week, I finished the fourteenth segment of the American Discovery Trail, which took me to Pike Lake State Park, making my way into the southwest corner of Ohio. Cincinnati is my next big landmark, but I will not be there even by the end of April. Meanwhile, there are a number of pretty places in Ohio.

I walked through the town of Chillicothe this week, which looks a lot like a midwestern town, with nice brick buildings. Chillicothe was the first capital of Ohio, from 1803 to 1810, when the capital moved to Zanesville, then again from 1812 to 1816, when the capital moved to Columbus, where it has stayed so far. Also according to Wikipedia, Chillicothe is the seventh place in Ohio to be called Chillicothe, which is some sort of record I would think.

For the month, I walked over 320,000 steps, which would have been a pretty weak effort on my walk to Miami, when I was getting over 350,000 regularly, but for this walk it's a very decent month. Maybe I am getting older (almost certainly), but maybe I am just more relaxed, less focused on getting so many steps every day. In a month like this one, where I count every day, a little less than 150 miles per month looks like it will be normal, and with over 4,000 miles to go, that's a lot of months remaining. The path through Ohio, though, is the longest for any state until I get to Colorado, so I feel good about making my way across.

Scioto Trails State Park, south of Chillicothe.

Pike Lake State Park, at the end of segment fourteen of the American Discovery Trail. I like the picture, and the picnic tables look inviting. We are about thirteen miles past this place by now, but I will write about that in a future post.