As nature lovers, hiking has been one of our go-to outdoor activities over the years. We’ve gradually gotten smarter about what to take with us to make our hiking experience enjoyable (and safe). Check out our ultimate guide to hiking gear! Our guide is geared to day-hikers, not backpackers, which is something we may get into some day but haven’t yet!
Read MoreAs we shared previously, in 2022 we finally did something we had talked about doing for decades. We bought our own recreational land for camping and hiking. We wanted a spot within a reasonable driving distance of our home so distance wouldn’t hinder us from enjoying it, we wanted to be at a higher elevation to escape the hotter, more humid temperatures at lower elevations, and we wanted views. Check, check, check, and check! Laurel Ridge, which is what we named our mountain getaway, meets all of these, though it didn’t check our fifth box of having running water, though we believe there are likely springs that are on our list to search for.
Read MoreStarting way back with our first trip camping, we started a packing list to make life easy when it was time to gather our gear and head into the wild. Over the years, we have continued to update and grow the list based on supplies we find helpful. While we started out with most of our camping gear from Target, we have continued to upgrade our supplies over the years to have longer lasting, higher quality gear.
Read MoreAs I shared in our prior post which you can read here, we are the new owners of a 130-acre plot of mountain land, which we have named Laurel Ridge, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of our home state of Virginia. In hiking the multiple trails already cleared, we have come across really interesting features as well as various found objects (about which we’ll write more in the future). We quickly found ourselves with a lengthy list of all the really cool things we want to do, as well as some of the less fun but practical necessities like clearing brush from the trails before nature takes over.
Read MoreFor years we have talked about the idea of buying a chunk of land as our own personal getaway for hiking, camping, and relaxing. For most of those years, the reality was quite a ways out of reach. A distant dream at best.
In the past handful of years it become less distant, more possible, and I spent more hours than I’d like to count trolling realtor.com and zillow.com to check out available land. In the first six months of COVID, we began looking a bit more seriously because after all, you can’t get much safer than your own private, isolated vacation spot.
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