While Durham officials circle their wagons and privately mull how to come up with another $2 million to build a pivotal pedestrian bridge over I-40, thereby completing the 22-mile American Tobacco Trail, others outside the city are more candid with possible solutions. Durham discovered the shortfall in July when it opened bids from eight contractors on the project, which also calls for about 4 miles of paved trail. The lowest…

We’ve added two more greenways to our greenway guide, both of which offer a potential day of escape, especially for young families. Smithfield: Buffalo Creek Greenway. When we stumbled across this work-in-progress in spring 2010, we were surprised by the audacity of such a project (a $1.2 million, 3.3-mile greenway) in a relatively small town (population 13,000ish). The greenway joins the  city’s historic center with new development on the north…

To paraphrase a former vice president attempting to paraphrase a popular saying from the ’70s, a June weekend is a terrible thing to waste. So don’t. Coast No matter how far you’ve ever walked, I’m guessing you’ve never walked back in time. You can Saturday, on the monthly two-hour historical walking tour through Wilmington’s Oakdale Cemetery. “Oakdale,” writes Janet Seapker on the cemetery’s Web site, “was part of the Rural…

Sometimes all you need to get moving is a good excuse. Permission, say, to get up from your desk and take a 30-minute walk. Which is what you have today from the American Heart Association. Today is National Start! Walking Day, deemed so by the American Heart Association. Today, over your lunch “hour,” the AHA wants you to get up from your desk and take a 30-minute walk — a…

America, you may have noticed, has developed a case of the runs. Hardly a weekend goes by when you don’t run across at least one 5K benefiting a worthy cause. They raise awareness and they raise a lot of money. They also give millions of runners a reason to train. But what if you’re not a runner? What if a nice, long walk is more your pace? Are there any…

The Triangle’s greenway system is a tiny step closer to becoming a complete network. Joe Godfrey, parks planner with the Town of Cary, tells GGNC that a 1.3-mile missing link of the Black Creek Greenway should be finished mid-April. The stretch would extend the existing 5.6 miles of Black Creek Greenway running south from Lake Crabtree to Chapel Hill Road on to Maynard Road. A short stretch of the sidewalk/greenway…

I pulled over on the greenway and stared at the sign, puzzled. Puzzled not by the sign’s message, which was clear. Puzzled by its mere existence. For years, the Triangle’s greenways consisted of strings of half-mile and mile-long bits of elbow macaroni, scattered about. Signs — signs showing you where you were and where you could go — weren’t a priority on a path that simply went from Point A…

We were hiking a new section of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail along the Eno River today when we came upon an old rail line, which I realized was the Norfolk Southern line that, for a while, looked like it might turn into a rails-to-trails project running from Person County south to downtown Durham. Downtown Durham and rails-to-trails projects reminded me of the American Tobacco Trail, the northern end of which begins…

You’ve got more important things to do today than read a long, windy blog. Like vote and get in some exercise — which you can likely do at the same time. I just got back from fulfilling both my obligation as a member of the greatest democracy mankind has known, and my obligation to my body. Walked about a mile to my polling place, voted, walked another half mile to…

You’ve seen people jogging on the greenway or plodding away on the treadmill, oblivious to all but the ear buds pumping a driving beat into their ears. And, according to science, pumping an extra boost of juice into their workout. The American Council on Exercise recently reviewed seven studies conducted since 1999 that all agreed that listening to music has a positive impact on your workout. (There’s a caveat, but…