Eighteen Miles: The Condensed Version

Once again it's late and I'm tired after a busy evening of making 3-Day related preparations. I should go to bed, but I'm afraid that I'll never get around to sharing the story of our 18 mile walk on Sunday if I don't do it now. I'm going to try to keep it short, although I'm generally terrible at condensing a story, as you might have noticed. Maybe some bullet points will help!

• We left at about 11:30 a.m. I wanted to leave about 10:30, but Mom was late getting to my house. We couldn't leave much earlier though because it was COLD in the morning.
  
• We walked about 4 miles to the Dillons at 6th and Wakarusa, where we borrowed the facilities. The highlight of this leg was the hill on Peterson up to Monterey Way. The lowlight was the cold wind we were walking into!
• We walked about another 2-3 miles to the Miller Mart at 23rd and Wakarusa, where we bought some water and sat for a few minutes while we refilled our bottles. The highlight of this leg was definitely the beautiful sunshine in our faces! We stretched a few minutes and headed down back out onto the trail.
• We literally hooked into the hike/bike trail as we reached the end of Wakarusa, and followed it 3-4 more miles out to the movie theaters, where we were able to cut across a couple of parking lots to make it to our destination--Target! The highlights of this leg were seeing a beautiful hawk sitting on someone's fence and walking along the scenic treeline and by various ponds. We did stop for just a few minutes in this leg to do a little more stretching!
• We stopped at Target for probably 40 minutes or so, splitting a terrific sandwich and following it up with a large cinammon pretzel. Yum! After buying some Gatorade we headed back out onto the trail.
  
• We walked back up to Lawrence Avenue and followed it all the way to 23rd, where we cut around the new parking area by the new research building on West Campus, and then wound up the hill to my office at KU Endowment. While Mom took another break and stretched, I logged onto Google maps and checked to see how far it would be for us to walk to Jack's, where Chad was watching the Steelers game. We determined that it would take us too long to get there and we should probably just head straight home. After changing socks and using the facilities, we headed back out to walk, but unfortunately by this time the sun was starting to go down and it was getting cold!!
  
• We walked across the street from my office and took a detour through Pioneer Cemetery, which sadly I'd never done in 10 years of working right next to it. Talk about fascinating! There are so many graves of people who died in Quantrill's Raid--I had no idea!
• We headed towards main campus as the sun went down, walking around the dorms and down 15th and up Naismith hill and down Jayhawk Boulevard. All very pretty, but very cold. We cut through the Union, stretched a few minutes, and then went out the back door to wind around the stadium up to Maine street.
  
• We walked all the way down Maine past 6th, which wasn't just cold--it was treacherous! There are a lot of uneven sidewalks in Old West Lawrence, and unfortunately not a lot of streetlights!
  
• After crossing 6th we made a quick facilities stop at the hospital, and then walked the last 1+ mile to our house, singing the Hallelujah chorus most of the way (literally--we were signing Handel's Messiah because it helped keep us going)!
• We arrived home at about 6:30, but after walking for most of the day, it felt like 10:00! We made it though, and Mom did great!
  

Okay, so the bullets didn't really help the length of my post, but at least I got it done in about 20 minutes! :)