Barefoot Southwest

 I started off on a five day backpacking trip from the Santa Barbara Campground with an old friend of mine, Randy, and my wife, Laura.  Randy's original itinerary seemed ambitious to me, and we did end up modifying it. I completed about half the trip barefooted, unless you count the length of the second day - in that case, it was a little less than half, but I'm not counting that way.  It is my blog after all. I have hiked some of the wilderness in the Santa Barbara area before barefoot, when it was raining and my feet were sloshing around too much in my sandals.  I remembered it as being fairly barefoot friendly, but the gravel gets under your skin after a while, so to speak. My trip did not leave me with feet looking like an advertising for barefoot hiking, but most of the injuries were superficial, and it was enjoyable. I made the entire first day, which we estimate at being six miles, barefooted. Here I am on a typically rocky section on that initial hike in. ...

 I don't really have anything to add here, but I was thinking that I might take some photographs of the backpacking trip I hope to do soon, and I hope to do a lot of it barefoot, and I was thinking of adding them, as an off-topic aside, to my happylittlethreespeedbicycle blog. But, if I'm going to blog about barefoot specific things, I really should, I imagine, create another blog, though I don't imagine I will flood this blog with posts. One thing that holds me up is I almost never carry a cell phone, so I don't have many photographs of the things that I want to post.  I usually use a film camera, and lately, I have been developing the film myself, so in order to get digital images, I have to scan the film, which I really don't like to do because I have to sit in front of a computer all day for work. Being barefoot, not carrying a cell phone, riding bicycles rather than driving, and using a film camera are all sort of a piece to me - some counter-culture lifestyle ...