I ended up with two copies of this book, so this copy is on its way to katyan in Finland. Enjoy!

This wonderful book arrived here today! Thank you!

Oh, I just loved this book! It was really good company on my flight from Helsinki to Raleigh, I finished it all during my way. Bill Bryson writes really well and it is always nice to read his books. Only thing I missed a bit was more description of nature in this book, but anyway it was nice to know more about the Appalachian trail. Here's one of my favourite parts in this book:

"But perhaps it is also raining, a cold, slanting, merciless rain, with thunder and lightning playing on the neighboring hills. Perhaps a troop of Eagle Scouts comes by at a depressing trot. Perhaps you are cold and hungry and smell so bad that you can no longer smell yourself. Perhaps you want to lie down and be as the lichen: not dead exactly but just very still for a long, long time."

I'm going to pass this book to one dear friend of mine from Raleigh who loves hiking too! Enjoy!

I borrowed this book to paavo33 & now it arrived back to me!

This book will travel next around Finland as a small Finnish bookring. The participants of the bookring are:

tintti, Jyväskylä
marja-leena, Oulu
Niora, Joensuu
...
Enjoy!

I got the book from katyan today. Thanks! At our local bc-meeting we also planned our own walk in the woods - not on the Appalachian trail, but somewhere closer. We'll see how that turns out in a couple of weeks!

I enjoyed the book a lot. It even made me laugh out loud a couple of times - I just love Bryson's dryish sense of humor. I also enjoyed learning about the Appalachian Trail, altough I probably never go hiking there (or maybe I will, who knows? I'd be very much afraid of bears, though).

Thanks to katyan for letting me read this book! I'll send it to marja-leena soon.

EDIT 26.5.07: marja-leena spends her summer in Norway, so she asked me to send the book to Niora first.

P.S: Our own Walk in the Woods, a.k.a. The Bookcrossing Spring Festival, was a success and we'll definitely do it again!

I received this today in Tampere at the Finnish BCers' summer meeting. Thanks! I received two other ring-or-ray books at the same time, but I guess I'll manage. :-)

The book accompanied me on a trip to Brussels, where I had a job interview (it'll be a while before I'll hear anything about the potential result of the interview, thanks for asking). It made very nice travel reading!

Having hiked fairly a lot in the wilderness of Lapland and northern Finland myself, but never more than about 60 kilometers per hiking trip, I followed Bryson's preparations for the 2100-mile (!!) hike on the Appalachian Trail (which I'd never heard of before; sounds way cool though!) with awe and some alarm. The whole idea of two unfit, overweight middle-aged guys taking up something as grandiose as this mainly made me want to tell them that they were definitely going to have a heart attack and die somewhere along that trail. Well, their hike was obviously quite an effort, but not quite the disaster scenario I had in my mind. All in all, Bryson and Katz seem to have managed one hill and mountain after another pretty well!

Plenty of the hiking-related phenomena were very familiar of course, particularly the constant desperate balancing between heavy packs and being adequately clothed and equipped. (I force myself to pack efficiently by carrying a rather small backpack on my hikes – it always feels way too small when I pack up but weighs more than enough on the trail.) And I remember a lonely day hike in a Finnish national park when I sang loudly to myself all day in order to let any bears ahead of me know that I was coming. (Hungry bears don't come after humans over here, but it was demonstrated just a few years ago that, e.g., an innocent jogger in an urban area in Finland can end up between a mother bear and her cub by accident and get killed for it.) Being exhausted and thirsty is also very familiar, of course. :-)

I'll have to look up more Bryson, I very much enjoy both his colorful accounts of his personal experiences and the fact that he does his homework and educates his readers on all sorts of interesting side trails!

The book should apparently be going to marja-leena next, but since she's out of the country for summer, I guess I'll be keeping it here for now - I'll PM her and katyan to make sure what to do now.

Update (July 20): Mailed to marja-leena this morning. Happy trails! :-)

The book was waiting for me when I came for summer holidays from Norway.It looks fascinating.

I got inspired by this book. Two elderly men in a bad shape make the American Trail. Many other people should try the same or at least a little hike in their neighborhood.

The book gave me insight into an American landscape that I didn't know existing.So cool to hear that many forestry parts of AT have once been farmland or hosting hotels. It is not all deforestration and booming tourism in this world. On other hand the glimpses into the outside world of the AT were kinda not too inspiring.

I could recommend the book to lots of people.It has so much humour as well.I am mailing it to katyan soon.

This book arrived home safely today!

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

I think it is time to let this book to find some new readers, so I'll pass it forward soon... Welcome to bookcrossing for all the new readers and I hope you'll enjoy this book! -katyan