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Two-Heel Drive, A Hiking Blog
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A blog for hikers, with links and commentary about the experience of hiking, camping and enjoying the wilderness. Updated daily.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'tom's travels'
Snow confounds hiking plans
The blizzard that buried the Northeast this weekend left a mere 4 or 5 inches of wet, sticky snow in our neck of the woods. Sunday was bright, sunny and seasonable, with only one hitch: the blizzard socked in all the nearby state parks where I was th...
Another no-hike weekend
I’ve just returned from a four-day trip to visit family back in Illinois, where I hadn’t put in a holiday showing in 10 years. Two 13-hour drives in four days is some fun, I’m here to tell you. At least I got to pass through some mo...
Alas, no hikes to report this weekend
The ugly flu that’s making such a nuisance of itself has visited our little household. I’m not sick but my better half is, and I couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for strolling amid nature’s wonders when one of its bugs is tak...
Fall colors on the Blue Ridge Parkway
No hikes to report this week, but we did get some miles in driving down the Blue Ridge Parkway — which has tons of nearby trails, so I did accomplish a bit of scouting for future treks. We’ve got a mere smattering of color around the...
Bay Area hiking guide assembled
As I promised a few weeks back, I’ve created a few pages that sum up the Bay Area hiking experience as I saw it from 2004 to 2009. It starts here. Won’t be anything new to the regulars; it’s mostly for Googlers seeking trail sugge...
Rewards of four years of blogging
Seems I have a full-time job now. Dave and Alicia at Trailspace.com — who hired me first to write some free-lance pieces for their site and later to help update their gear database — have opted to put me to work full-time in an editorial/...
New Guides feature at EveryTrail.com
I’m posting because, ahem, I wrote most of them (and Stuart of Trailspotting wrote the rest, on his favorite Hawaii hikes). It was an ambitious project: Joost Schreve, EveryTrail’s CEO, hired me to write 25 guides to Bay Area hikes ̵...
OK, class, tell us about your summer vacation
OK, after three address changes and one (probably permanent) career change, it’s time to get back to this business of blogging about hiking. Main motivator: Two Heel Drive has slipped to No. 2 in the “hiking blog” rankings on Googl...
Man what a week that was
Didn’t get so much as a nanosecond on the trail this weekend, though I did get in a fair amount of elevation gain carrying a load. Last Tuesday we learned that my Aunt Bev had passed on; we drove 13 hours Wednesday from NC to Peoria, spent Th...
Guess what, they’re paying me to hike — sort of
So I have a solid two months of free-lance work lined up, which settles the “Tom needs to have a job before he starts blogging regularly again” issue. With any luck those two months can turn into a permanent gig, or as permanent as it get...
On the road, bearing east
An account of traveling cross-country via automobile would be an affront to all that is right in the world of hiking blogs, so I plan to post some updates at my homepage. Follow along if you’ve got a notion. Right now there’s not much be...
A quick update
As all you regulars know, I’m planning to relocate to the Eastern Seaboard next month. Right now my main preoccupation is finding another j-o-b, but I can offer these words of reassurance: Wherever we finally end up will have to be near major h...
Beginning of a great adventure
My time’s about up down at the paper mill. I’m taking a severance package and moving on next month. The move is literal, I’m afraid. Melissa and I are going to pack our things and head east to North Carolina to hang out with her fa...
Lookin’ for the good stuff here?
Just check out all the posts in which I used the adjective “harrowing” (Count ‘em: 17 posts!) According to the Free Dictionary, it looks like I was misusing it most of the time. (My definition: “some scary s**t”) ....
Roadtripping today
Will post pretty pictures tomorrow, I promise....
Twitter feed for hiking gear deals
I’m frankly getting sick of filling all my perfectly good Bay Area hiking pages with a constant stream of merchandising (and I imagine it’s 10 times worse in your case). So I created a Twitter feed where I’ll post all future deal-re...
What people bought last week
Think Tank Rotation 360°, Two Section Convertable Photo Backpack.This pack has an intriguing design: the bottom section rotates 360 degrees. More ideas for hiking camera bags here. Slumberjack SlumberWick¿ Mummy Sleeping Bag Liner — Sleeping ...
Just rewards of becoming an Amazon associate
Sweat socks, shaver accessories and toner cartridges have been my biggest sellers to date (thanks, Mom!). A few of my most devoted readers came through and bought maps of Angel Island, Mount Diablo and Henry Coe (before-tax profit: $1.49) but my revi...
Get Two-Heel Drive via e-mail
I added this to my rail awhile back to see if anybody actually noticed it. A couple people have signed up so, what the heck, if you’d like the folks at Feedburner to send you an e-mail every time I post something here, click on this link to sub...
Laughable Google Maps route
Check this out: Google Maps lists this as an alternate route to the Dowdy Ranch entrance to Henry Coe State Park: View Larger Map Those roads are definitely on the map, but there’s no way to drive through them unless you own keys to the gates....
E-commerce update
Your friends and fellow hikers bought 10 items from Amazon.com in the past week. Interestingly, only three were things I thought folks might be interested in buying; the rest were all other stuff folks decided they liked better after they clicked on ...
Two-Heel Drive store upgraded
I’ve spent the last few days adding tons of books, DVDs and gear that should earn me a solid $12.97 by year’s end. The subzero correlation between effort and revenue is much like hiking itself, so it’s kinda-sorta appropriate. My w...
On vacation this week
Had a little family emergency that had to be attended to over the past few days, but things are back in order now, which brings me to: I’m on vacation from the paper mill this week so I’ll try to get some hikes in, but posting will be eve...
What I’m doing today
UPDATE: Star hike didn’t happen; life intervened. But there’ll be other full moons. Star Trek this morning, star hike tonight (Mission Peak in the moonlight revisited.)...
Taking hike requests
You know how when you call in to the radio station and ask for a song they were going to play anyway and then they say “this one requested by Cletus from Toadsuck Ferry” … it’s kinda like that only I haven’t sold out to ...
Just past the 2,000th post
Who’d a thunk there was so much to say about hiking? Lately it occurs to me there still is not a be-all and end-all site for hikers, no Facebook for dirtwalkers. There are sites about gear, sites for talking about gear, sites about specific l...
