What’s Your Summer Adventure?
Have you had your summer adventure yet?
Kids are going to camp, families to the beach, couples on cruises, boaters daring the Great Loop, RVers traveling the highways, sisters reuniting for long road trips, roamers climbing mountains, paddlers kayaking unfamiliar passages, sightseers wandering exotic cities …
I was pretty impressed with 19-year-old Calvert Countian Evan Metz’s 41⁄2-month-long 2,189.2-mile hike along the Appalachian Trail, recounted this week by contributing writer Selene SanFelice, who has her own adventures lined up.
Then new staff writer Kathy Knotts tops that. Her friend Brady Adcock of Mars Hill, N.C., an ultra-marathoner, picks up his pace, running on the AT.
Apparently, you can always push it farther.
While you circumnavigate the Bay, somebody else rounds the globe. You fly round the Earth in 80 days; somebody else does it in a week. You climb 5,270 vertical feet up Mt. Katahdin. Somebody else climbs Denali at 20,322 feet. Still somebody else summits Mt. Everest at 29,029 feet. You snorkeled in the Florida Keys. Our dear old proofreader Dick Wilson and wife Ellie scuba-ed around the world before retiring their masks and tanks. You visit your kids in St. Louis. Your friend makes her family visit to Singapore.
But that’s not the point, is it?
What matters is doing it. Your doing it.
Every adventure is the achievement of its own adventurer.
The distance you travel is your distance, and it can reach up mountainsides, down into lightless depths, across oceans, the Bay, rivers or creeks.
You can even make your journey inward, into the depths of human time and mind. That’s where I find myself, compelled by my journey even though the book I’m writing is about Illinois country women while my friend biographs Italian type designers and English caricaturists.
What’s your summer adventure? Inspire me — and the rest of us on this page — with your story. Tell us where you went, why and one wonder you encountered: [email protected].
Sandra Olivetti Martin, Editor and publisher