A walk around the block

At Country Fair, we had route for a walk around the apartment complex that we could do almost entirely on sidewalks that we called “walking around the block.” It took 7 minutes, so I figured it was about a third of a mile. Most nice evenings we’d go do that walk, often going two or three times around.

One of the first things I wanted to do at Winfield Village was find a similar walk, and the situation is actually a bit better here: At Country Fair the old part of the complex had its various sidewalks connected so that you could walk in a big circle. The newer part of the complex wasn’t like that: It had sidewalks from each building to the closest parking lot, but they’d not been connected to one another, so there was no good way to go for a walk—you constantly had to either cut through the grass, or else walk through the parking lots. Here the whole complex is well-connected with sidewalks.

The most obvious way around is a bit over half a mile, but has the disadvantage of taking us out along Curtis Road, which doesn’t make for an especially pleasant walk.

It’s easy to skip that leg, staying inside the complex, but that shortens the walk, making it a bit less than half a mile.

Happily, there are some additional segments of sidewalks, connecting the sidewalks that run to the backs of the parking lots to one another (exactly what was missing at Country Fair), meaning that it’s pretty easy to put together a connected walk around the perimeter of the complex.

We went out for just that walk today, and I tracked it on Endomondo to see the length, and was pleased to find that the most obvious way to walk around the perimeter of the complex, starting and ending at our townhouse, is exactly one mile.

Here’s the map:

It’s not crucial to have a defined walk to call a “walk around the block.” It would be just as good to just go wander around, turning whichever way we feel like on any particular day, putting together different segments in a different order each day. But I like having a particular walk that we call a “walk around the block.” It’s comfortably predictable.

I expect we’ll take that walk pretty often.