After years of dreaming and sixteen months after nailing down our start date, we are finally announcing our family's plans to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail in 2014.

We have decided to host our Appalachian Trail writing on Toe Salad. We have great plans in the works for sharing the story of our adventure and helping other families with similar dreams and outdoor aspirations.

Come join us at Toe Salad as we move this project into preparation mode, and follow along as we make this crazy dream into a reality.

Today is the first day of winter and the shortest day of the year here in the Northern Hemisphere. To help you get ready for winter activities I've pulled together some posts we've written here, and elsewhere, about staying warm in winter.

Last winter was our family's first winter on backcountry skis. Over the past few winters we have been exploring various means of backcountry travel in an effort to decide what would work best for us. We wanted to be able to travel longer distances over snow, while at the same time be able to have some fun going down. Having moved close to the Chic-Chocs - we are within 1.5 hours drive of a plethora of beautiful backcountry ski places - we wanted to be able to take advantage of all of the winter ski opportunities we could. Outfitting five had the potential to get expensive, so we had to get creative about doing this in an economic fashion.

Reading The Hidden Europe did something unexpected to me - it made me want to visit eastern Europe. I think that may have been Francis' intent. The Hidden Europe expanded my understanding of the world. I love learning and I love it when you can study culture and history is such an engaging manner.