Welcome. I’m nine days away from leaving for my month-long odyssey, and finally getting around to setting up a place to blog. In September, I’ll be walking two of the United Kingdom’s amazing national trails—the Cotswold Way and the Offa’s Dyke Path.

For those of you who haven’t heard me talk about my odd vacation strategy of walking all over creation, you might try reading my Time Out Chicago article on my 2009 journey with my sister on the Coast to Coast Trail across northern England.

So, a few details. I’ll be walking the Cotswold Way first, heading north to south, then the Offa’s Dyke Path from the south of Wales to the North. That’s a total of 275 miles of walking (approximately, and not counting the odd sidetrip, excursion off-trail to a pub, or incidents of the dreaded “getting lost”—which my sister Tracy can attest makes me swear a lot, especially when it adds three or four miles to the day…). Being too busy to work out accommodations on my own, I have left all that fuss to a travel company that specializes in walks in the U.K. It’s probably costing me a bit more in money, but saving me in research time and aggravation.

Also, my travel company doesn’t just make B&B reservations; they also offer luggage transfer service, which means I’ll be walking with a light day pack while my bigger bag rides from B&B to B&B in a van. Ecologically a nightmare (all that gas to haul my dirty clothes? Quel outrage!) but it makes the walking soooo much more pleasant. And that’s the key, for me anyway. Some people hike in a very macho ‘must haul my 70 pound pack’ way, but as the name of this blog suggests, I am in it for the ramble.

I’ll try to post from the trails as often as I can, with stories and photos. To make that happen, I am renting a WiFi hotspot and bringing my laptop. This runs against my standing policy that the point of taking a vacation is to get away from your life and to be as out of touch as possible, but I am being dragged into the age of instant available-anywhere communications, so this will be an experiment in having access to a computer while trying to let go of the day-to-day worries of my normal life. Wish me luck.