This blog has been a long time in the making, even if I only kind of came up with the idea this afternoon.

Backing up a bit, I moved to New York in May of 2011. I'll save the story of how I got here for an "About Me" section, but in short, I've been surprised by how much I enjoy living here.

One of my favorite things to do in New York has been to go on walks. In the beginning most of these walks took me from my apartment on the Upper West Side to my office in Midtown, but in May or June of this year that changed. I don't know what motivated me to do it, but one day I decided to walk from my apartment on W. 72nd Street to Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan. I put on my shoes, queued up a Grateful Dead live album on my iPod, and set off. I saw a lot of cool new things that day, and when I got to the end of the walk (about 8 miles or so) I thought it would be fun to do it again.

And do it again I did. Before long, this was becoming a weekly event for me - I would walk from my apartment to the bottom of the island, trying to vary my path every time. At one point I had a few weeks off from work and was going out every day. Sometimes I'd go south, sometimes I'd go north, and I always saw something new.

So, this afternoon I thought, "Man, wouldn't it be cool to walk every street on the island of Manhattan?" I answered myself with a resounding "Yes." I'll create a Mission Statement page at some point where I'll wax philosophical on why I think this endeavor warrants a blog (the internet has to be almost full by now - I probably need to justify the bandwidth I'll be using), but that will come later. For now, I'm going to walk, map my progress, and post pictures of cool things I see along the way.

I just ordered a camera with built-in GPS. Hope to make my first post this weekend.