Here’s the new cover. In addition to showing it to you, in this blog I want to tell you why I wrote the book.

If you’ve followed my writing, you know walking has been a passion for some time. What you may not know is about three years ago I decided to research the subject.

Basically, I wanted to know about walking for enjoyment. Have Homo sapiens always done that or have we used our feet only to get from Point A to Point B?

What I found was surprising. In written documents, walking for pleasure is a modern phenomenon—only about 200 years old. And the first to write about it were Europeans during what we English teachers call the Romantic Age. Of course, it soon spread to romantics and naturalists in the U.S.

You’ll hear from a bunch of these folks in my book—people like Jacques Rousseau, Robert Louis Stevenson and William Wordsworth, and, on this side of the pond, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Mark Twain.

Their stories are truly inspiring, and my hope is they will bring as much enjoyment to your walks as they have to mine.

One more thing—Don’t let the mountain pic discourage you (as in”I’m not looking for a book to climb peaks”). Only one of my 59 chapters is about high mountains. The phrase is aspirational—let’s not see ourselves as mere mall walkers. We can do much more!