Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

Participating in the Marvelous Middle Grade Mondays blog hop  hosted by Greg Pattrige of Always in the Middle , with loads of reviews of Middle Grade fiction (books for roughly ages 8-12).   Title: Just Keep Walking Author: Erin Soderberg Downing Publication info: Scholastic Press, 2024. 242 pages. Publisher's Blurb: Two years after her parents’ surprising and painful split, twelve-year-old Jo and her mom find themselves on the 100-mile hike on the Superior Hiking Trail along Lake Superior’s north shore –a journey that Jo had always looked forward to hiking with her dad. It’s not a situation that either of them ever predicted they’d find themselves in, yet here they are in the wilderness with their entire lives stuffed into a pair of thirty-pound packs. Along the trail, they’ll suffer through endless aches and pains, scorching heat, and crippling self-doubt. They’ll encounter bears, moose, and other wildlife and meet and collect an assortment of unlikely friends. Day

This post is from 2015, but the retrospective photos date back, in at least some cases, to 1998 when our first-born was a toddler. The message still seems completely relevant. Maybe I should do a second edition, showing our boys as teens and now adults, enjoying the outdoors with the family. (Oh, and yes, I know this Friday post is on Saturday. I consider knowing what day of the week it is a triumph!) [Apparently I'd made some kind of plan to spiff up the blog, something I do on a regular basis--make the plans, that is, not necessarily carry them through] In keeping with my new blog plan, instead of a book review, today I'm doing a sort of a trip review...a few shots of the kids enjoying the outdoors through the years, in hopes of reminding folks that there's no gift for the kids like taking them outside. I apologize for some of the photos--many of these pre-date our digital photography, and not all the scans turned out well. Start them right from the beginning. Rememb

All this packing and sorting has me feeling sort of nostalgic, so I thought I'd take a deep dive into the photos for some of our earlier backpacking adventures with our boys. These are from the summer of 2005, when they were 6 & 7 years old. We did several shorter trips in Colorado that summer, before we headed to Wyoming for our longer (I think 6 days, 5 nights) trip. The boys were small, so Mom and Dad were definitely packhorses--and we didn't know as much about lightweight gear then, either. Glad to put those days behind us, but it was fun to hike with our boys. Did a quick overnight into the back side of the Maroon Bells Wilderness. Not the popular part, but rugged and scenic. Kid-sized packs--you have to match the pack to the size of the kid, even if it can't hold much. Note the all-important stuffies poking their heads out to watch where we were going. I think it was pretty early, given the amount of snow around! A room with a view.  Take kids outdoors and they wi

Not your typical family portrait. My guest post last week at CoachDaddy has inspired me to do some more photo posts from trips long gone by. This one is from 2009, and was the first time we took our boys on a significant piece of off-trail hiking. They were 10 and 11. The route was challenging, starting with a truly nasty climb from the trailhead to the first camp, and we splurged on a packer to haul our stuff that far (this is also a good way to allow for some heavy food the first night!).  The route was from Pine Creek (near Bishop, CA), over French Creek Pass, then off trail to Miriam Lake, and farther off trail to the Bear Lakes and Italy Pass, where we picked up the trail again back down Pine Creek Canyon. The initial climb is long, hot, and not so pretty, as you climb above the mining operations in the bottom of the canyon. I was glad to have only a daypack, enabling me to make a faster climb, though the higher we got the better the views. By lunch time we had climbed out of the