The Appalachian Trail
If you like to hike and be in the woods, enjoying the sights and sounds - or pristine silences - offered by being in touch with wilderness and nature, then a trip along the Appalachian Trail may be just perfect for you. The humorous and insightful author Bill Bryson wrote a best-selling book about walking the famous “A.T.”, and many others have made it an annual trek. Some people have even planned their entire lives around the trail walk, by planning to live nearby where they can hit the trail every chance they get.
The “A. T.” runs from Maine to Georgia, through some of the most untouched and spectacular forested mountain regions of the USA, and is a well maintained walking path. Sometimes it opens up into a wide road path, and other times it involves fording streams or scrambling over boulders, but the path leads one for hundreds of miles, without ever encountering modern civilization. Of course most travelers who camp along the trail will stop from time to time to resupply in nearby towns, or to just enjoy the comfort of a hot shower and a soft bed.
It is possible to walk only a section of the trail. Some people walk it for an hour or a weekend, whereas others walk it for months, trying to plan their trip so that they don'’ hit the worst weather - the blizzards up north or the swarms of mosquitoes in the hot south of Georgia - but there are many ways to approach hiking the Appalachian Trail, and there are hundreds of places to begin at a trailhead along the way.