Awhile back I was inspired by a post on a local Albuquerque group blog called [Duke City Fix](http://dukecityfix.com) about a guy who walked across town, taking pictures along the way. I've always liked walking and thought it would be cool to do a similar walk. Every place I've worked at I've taken my lunch hours and walked around, sometimes taking pictures but mostly just exploring. You find a lot of neat stuff walking since you're moving slow and you're close to the ground. Even if you're in an office park or urban area I'd encourage you to try walking around and seeing what you see. You might be surprised.

For my walk I decided to go on Montgomery since it goes basically from one side of Albuquerque to the other. It also goes across the river and through our Bosque / North Valley area which is by far my favorite walking area in town. I started at Tramway, the east side of the city, and walked all the way to Coors on the west side. It’s 10.9 miles according to Google Maps and with a couple of small detours I made I think I pretty much did exactly 11 miles. This is far longer than I’ve ever walked before but I did it. :)

My Long Walk Route

Google said it was going to take 3 1/2 hours, which is about 20 minutes per mile. I thought this was doable but I didn’t factor in the heat. It was 81 degrees an hour or so after I started but it got up past 91 a few hours in. This meant I needed to rest and refill my water bottle more often than I anticipated (thank you McDonalds for having cold water, air conditioning, and 3 locations along my route!). It ended up taking me 4 1/2 hours with rest breaks.

I did a sort-of live tweeting of the walk, which you can find on my Twitter stream. The tweeting was fun for me, and helpful with the nice encouragements I got from my friends on there. That’s another nice thing about walking, you can do other stuff at the same time. It’ s hard to tweet from a bike. :)

The other part of the walk was taking pictures. I decided against taking my regular camera with me on this first walk since I was already carrying a water bottle, so I took some pictures with my iPhone camera instead. It’s cool to be able to upload the pics to Flickr while walking too. The whole set can be found at Flickr if you’re interested.

I’m very glad I did this walk, even with the heat and pain my poor legs felt later. I’m already thinking of how I would do a similar walk going North/South across town in fact.

For now though, here’s a picture of why the North Valley of Albuquerque is my favorite walking area. Right on the other side of this wall is one of the city’s busiest streets and you’d never know it.