O is for Occoneechee Speedway Trail: A to Z Blogging Challenge

It's April and you know what that means: The AtoZ Blogging Challenge! For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

My theme this year is Places in my Heart, all about the places I've been and loved and that have mattered to me in a lasting sense.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too.

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O is for Occoneechee Speedway Trail

The Occoneechee Speedway is one of my favorite places in Hillsborough, North Carolina, the town I've made my home in for almost a decade now. It used to be a racetrack, a NASCAR dirt track built for the inaugural race season of 1949. 

There are reunions and community celebrations there sometimes. But most of the year, it's a lovely wooded spot where my dog and I run past the old car, judge's stand, and viewing platforms, lightening both our souls. 

I've enjoyed walking down at the Speedway ever since I learned it existed, but it's really become one of my places since I took up running about six months ago. 

If you've been reading my posts this month, you know how much I like the woods and natural places, and how much I like ruins, ghost towns, and abandoned places. And this has the best of both those worlds. 

Recently some additional trails were completed that connect the Speedway to the Riverwalk, so you can get around a fair amount of our lovely little town without leaving the woods. Since it's warm so much of the year here, you can enjoy it nearly all year long. 

If you ever come to Hillsborough, here's where you should go to stretch your legs. It's a lovely, peaceful place. 

N is for Natural Bridge State Park: A to Z Blogging Challenge

It's April and you know what that means: The AtoZ Blogging Challenge! For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

My theme this year is Places in my Heart, all about the places I've been and loved and that have mattered to me in a lasting sense.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too.

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N is for Natural Bridge State Park

I'm a woods girl. Nothing soothes my soul like time among the trees. Maybe it's the extra oxygen, maybe it's something more spiritual than that. I don't know. But I do know that it's head-clearing and heart-lightening to spend time in leafy light. 

When I was an undergraduate student at Morehead State University in Morehead, Kentucky, I was always running off to the news. Morehead itself is in the Daniel Boone National Forest and there's a lot of state park land, caves, and amazing rock formations in the area. I explored like crazy during those years. 

One of my favorite places for Natural Bridge State Park in Red River Gorge. It's named, of course, for the Natural Bridge, a wide platform of rock you can climb and walk on. 

It's odd because, generally, I am a bit afraid of heights. I don't like stairwells where I can see between the stairs, or looking out the window of a skyscraper. But when the heights are not human-made, I have a little more faith in them. I want to be on top, looking out at what nature has made. 

I once sat on the bridge at this park watching a storm move towards me across the horizon, lightning streaking the darkening sky. I stayed until the wind was whipping my hair around and my jacket was damp with the rain. I can still feel the charge in the air when I close my eyes. 

Places of rock and tree are magic. I truly believe so. 

M is for Museum Road: A to Z Blogging Challenge

It's April and you know what that means: The AtoZ Blogging Challenge! For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

My theme this year is Places in my Heart, all about the places I've been and loved and that have mattered to me in a lasting sense.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too.

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M is for Museum Road

I once had a flat in Oxford England. 

It gives me a little shiver of excitement to say that. For me, it was one of those "bucket list" kind of things. A bookish girl like me simply had to see England somehow, sometime. And luckily, that opportunity came to me through grad school. 

See, I have a fancy-schmancy Master's Degree from the Bread Loaf School of English of Middlebury College. Not where you'd expect a blue-collar background girl like me to end up. I was lucky enough to get to go there through some special funding the college received to bring their programs to rural Alaskan educators. I was a Dewitt-Wallace Readers Digest scholar. So, for four glorious summers, I was a Bread Loaf student, nearly all expenses paid. (It's a wonderful program, and if life ever gives you the chance to go: jump on it!)

One of those summers was spent at the Oxford campus, at Lincoln college. And because I had recently become a mother, I was granted a flat on Museum Row rather than dormitory space. The other grad students were grateful, I'm sure, that I wasn't trying to fit a crib into my dorm room (if such a thing would even have been allowed). 

I had never really lived in a city, having grown up in a small town (near a big city, but not in it) and having spent my adult life up to that point in *really* small places (like population 400 Kenny Lake or population 3500 Nome). 

But I threw myself into the experience that summer, enjoying theater opportunities, public transportation, street performances, delicious foods, and walking and walking and walking through the city streets and parks. Not to mention the Bodleian Library (book-girl heaven) and all the colleges of the Oxford system. Such architecture! Such history! Such inspiration! Such tea!

I'm still not a city girl. But for a few weeks, I loved playing at it. 

Thanks to my mother, and my then-in-laws, who came and helped care for my daughter while I was in class, I had one of the best summers of my life. The shabby little flats on Museum Row glow brightly in my memory. 

L is for Last Train to Nowhere: A to Z Blogging Challenge

It's April and you know what that means: The AtoZ Blogging Challenge! For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

My theme this year is Places in my Heart, all about the places I've been and loved and that have mattered to me in a lasting sense.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too.

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L is for Last Train to Nowhere

Nome, Alaska was my home for almost a decade. Of all the places I've hung my hat over the years, Nome is one that I really felt like I belonged in. It's the place where the odds are good, and the goods are odd. 

It's the home of my heart. 

That's not to say it's an easy place to be. It's really small. Like 3500 people. And isolated, as in no roads lead there. And cold. It's only 45 miles from the Arctic Circle, and is bordered by the Bering Strait, which sometimes freezes for miles out to sea. And the landscape strikes a lot of people as bleak, though I love the flat openness of it, and the subtle beauties. 

The Last Train to Nowhere is a rather poetically named tourist attraction. It's a train that has been left to sit on the tundra, stopped "in its tracks" forever. The locomotives were part of the mining history of Nome, once famed as a gold boomtown. Nome is littered with machinery that was brought in to excavate the riches of the earth in the 1880s, then left to rot because it was too expensive to haul it back out again. There's a small tourist industry built up in showing people these remnants of the boom times of the town and countryside. 

They say that nothing ever leaves Nome, and, at least for large machinery, that seems to be true. 

If you've been reading my posts during this challenge, then you already know that I kind of have a thing for lonely, isolated places and abandoned ghost towns. They pull at something in my soul in a different way than busy, populated places. Maybe its all the stories that hover over them, and the quiet that lets you spin them for yourself in your imagination. 

The Last Train to Nowhere is my kind of train, going to my kind of place. 

K is for Kennicott/McCarthy: A to Z Blogging Challenge

It's April and you know what that means: The AtoZ Blogging Challenge! For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

My theme this year is Places in my Heart, all about the places I've been and loved and that have mattered to me in a lasting sense.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too.

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K is for Kennicott/McCarthy

Kennicott (or Kennecott) /McCarthy is a ghost town in the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park area of Alaska. In its heyday, in the early 1900s, it was an active silver and copper mining district. Now, it's a fascinating tourist attraction (a National Historic Landmark) with a dramatic setting, which pulls in wilderness and adventure-minded travelers. 

Even just getting there is an adventure. First, you have to get to Alaska. Then, you have to drive part of the Alcan until it dries up, then drive down a deteriorating highway (the Edgerton) that was once a railbed. If you're renting your car, you're not even supposed to drive this road. I have a couple of railspikes that I found along this road among my treasured possessions. At a certain point, you have to get out of your car and go the rest of the way on foot. There's a footbridge now, but on my first visit, I had to pull myself across the river in a dangling handtruck. 

You can tour the Mill, eat and stay at the seasonally open Lodge or some refurbished cabins made into Bed and Breakfasts, hike on a glacier, or just sit and feel the awe. 

I've had the good fortune to visit a few times, including spending a week there as part of a geology class offered to teachers by the University of Alaska. It's on my list of places to go back to and show my children and husband. It's not easy traveling, but it's well worth it for the vistas that will linger in your mind forever. 

J is for Joseph-Beth: A to Z Blogging Challenge

It's April and you know what that means: The AtoZ Blogging Challenge! For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

My theme this year is Places in my Heart, all about the places I've been and loved and that have mattered to me in a lasting sense.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too.

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J is for Joseph-Beth Booksellers

I went to college in the eastern part of Kentucky, at Morehead State University. Morehead, in the early 1990s, wasn't a very big town (it's grown a bit since). If you wanted city pleasures like movie theaters and shopping malls, you had to drive to either Lexington, Kentucky or Huntington, West Virginia. 

So, I often did. 

Lexington was around an hour away from campus. And one of the best things in Lexington was Joseph-Beth Booksellers. 

In this time before big box bookstores like Borders and Barnes and Noble, when B. Dalton was the best most places had on offer, Joseph-Beth was the biggest fanciest bookstore I had ever seen. I was an English major, so it wasn't hard to find friends who thought wandering a bookstore was an excellent way to spend an afternoon or evening. 

There was a beautiful kids section where I spent money I didn't have buying holiday gifts for all my young cousins, a café where I enjoyed desserts with a book, and a HUGE store full of so many books! It was like a wonderland for bookish girls. I *lived* in that poetry section. 

Joseph-Beth had the offerings and giant retail space I've come to associate with a big box bookstore, but the feel and spirit of an independent. There was a section where the sales associates put out their recommendations, and creative displays of books based on themes or eras rather than just genre. They held neat events, too. I could have lived there. Heck, I still could!

I is for Island (Tybee Island): A to Z Blogging Challenge

It's April and you know what that means: The AtoZ Blogging Challenge! For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

My theme this year is Places in my Heart, all about the places I've been and loved and that have mattered to me in a lasting sense.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too.

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I is for Island (Tybee Island)

My now-husband and I had a trip to Tybee Island when he was my boyfriend. 

That was the weekend he became my fiancé. 

I think that would have happened anyway, but it probably happened that particular weekend because Tybee Island is such a lovely and romantic place, even in February. 

The beauty of the moment, down at the seaside at sunset (and, of course, his love for me), overcame him and he proposed right there. We were so happy we danced around in a circle jumping up and down for a while. It's probably a good thing no one else was there to see how silly we looked. 

My publicly-shareable memories of that weekend include lots of walking on the beach, seeing Pelicans (my favorite bird!) and dolphins, the lighthouse, and some truly delicious seafood (which my husband sweetly tolerated; being a non-seafood eater himself). 

Tybee is a quieter place than other tourist beach towns we've visited, which makes it perfect for us. We're really not noisy crowd sort of folk. We haven't yet been back, though not for lack of trying. Maybe the next anniversary.