When I tell people I’m going to walk down every street in Lexington, I often get a confused look or suggestion that this project is a strange way to spend one’s time.  Maybe the implication is that there cannot possibly be enough difference between two given streets to make this interesting.  By this writing, I’ve walked down nearly five percent of streets and have not yet found this to be so.  But it doesn’t matter; the intent of this project was not strictly to find interesting places.

I decided to walk every street in Lexington while making my then-daily circuit of Castlewood Park.  It was the synthesis of two ideas on walking that were rattling in my head.  The first was the concept of walking to think that Rebecca Solnit described in Wanderlust: A History of Walking.  The second was a column on good.is written by a guy who set a goal of walking every street in Brooklyn.  Initially, the idea of walking every street in a city was attractive to me, but the particular execution described in that column focused on socializing in a way that I wasn’t quite comfortable with.   It wasn’t until I brought it together with the idea of walking for contemplation that I could envision actually doing this.  My lunchtime walks gave me a low-risk entry into the project.  I have for nearly 10 years walked during lunch, generally in a park near wherever I’m working at the time.  I walk in all sorts of weather, and depending on conditions, I can manage a one to two mile walk on most days.

Lexington has approximately 1,200 miles of walkable roads (I’m excluding limited-access highways and ramps as well as streets outside the “urban service area.”)  Many of these streets are dead-end roads and I will have to cover these (and many other streets, for other reasons) twice.

There is no particular agenda.  I hope to learn something about the city of Lexington, to find some interesting things that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.  I’ll “blog” about each day’s walk, perhaps highlighting something interesting, perhaps focusing on something that was going through my head as I was walking.

Finally, I expect that my expectations are going to change, and that if you come back to this page months or years from now, I expect (and hope) that you will see this space evolve.