There's a review in a recent TLS of a book about walking (Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways), which I want to read. I could set out on foot, especially if I didn't have too much baggage, and keep going for days quite happily. Best not to have to return to the same spot every evening, but that is ok too. Best if the day begins steeply uphill and coming back down is the end-of-day reward. Around here we tend to take the same walk, because it's accessible on foot from the condo: up to the Stanford Dish and back. There are a couple of possible variations: in this season, we tend to approach the trail through a residential neighborhood, where there are largish houses with apple trees close to the road (and far from the house) where we can forage a few only slightly-bruised windfalls. Up in that neighborhood, but the other way, I once spotted a fig tree that I have never been able to find again. The roads all go in circles up there, sometimes the circles intersect, other times not. The Dish itself is fenced and locked at sunset, but if we leave home about 6 pm, in this end-of-summer season, we can just make the loop before "they" drive us out (literally, there's a "ranger" who goes around and picks up human strays and scolds them), and usually spot red-tail hawks watching for ground squirrels and ground squirrels watching for hawks, and families of deer. There are warnings about mountain lions; I've never seen one. Languages spoken among the fauna, including human: Mandarin, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish, Mandarin, German, Russian, and things I don't recognize, including probably Cantonese.

Better for walking straight from home is the Vaucluse, in the foothills of the Mont Ventoux, where Petrarch's ghost walks everywhere, but that's for another day.