I’ve been getting in a lot of walking while in Berlin. As with biking, Berlin is an outstanding city to do so in. The blocks are very long (my son Ryan brought that up yesterday from our visit in 2006), the extensive waterways all have walkways accompanying them, and there is a lot of public, open space (Tiergarten, Zoologischer Garten).

Today, for no particular reason (outside it looked like the last 70 degree plus day), I put on my orange SF Giants cap and decided to go for a little walk. So I walked to the end of Danziger Street.  When I got there, I thought maybe I’d walk to the Hauptbahnhof.  When I got there, I thought maybe I’d walk across Mitte.  And I figured since I walked this far, maybe I’d catch an S-Bahn to Zoologischer Garten and just walk across the great city of Berlin to Alexanderplatz. And that’s what I did. I walked clear across downtown Berlin.

When I saw something interesting, I’d take a break (usually in a park or museum area). When I got hungry I ate (today was some pretty amazing bread and herring). When I had to do other things, I did. By the time it was all said and done, according to fitbit I had racked up 31K steps on the day and over 15 miles.

As a complete aside, back at the end of last winter I was contemplating hiking the El Camino Santiago pilgrimage trial in Spain. As there are many routes to “The Camino,” I was going to take the popular “French Way” which is around 460 miles projected over 33 days on the trail (14.5 miles a day). As I may not repeat today any time soon, hats off to those that make the commitment to do so (or other hikes such as the Appalachian Trail). Like most things, it’s easy to do something once; much harder to do so on a sustainable basis.