Events – Page 8 – Nebraska Wander Freunde Trailblazers

On Walks and Walkers

We had a great turnout at our September 12th Breakfast Walk at Zorinsky Lake. The weather was perfect, the route was great and the food was plentiful. Special thanks go to Lee Frantz and Donna Campbell for sponsoring this walk and sharing it with 69 people.

Sandy Spaulding has laid out a great route for our Magic City Walk (aka South Omaha) on October 3rd, starting at El Museo Latino at 9 a.m. Workers are needed to staff the Start Point, the 3 Check Points and to greet folks and/or to walk with them. If you’d like to volunteer, don’t worry about getting to do the walk. The Workers’ Walk will be Saturday, September 26th at 9 a.m. Come a little early to do paperwork, but remember that the museum will not be open early that morning and bathrooms will not be available there or generally on the route that day. To volunteer, let Butch or Sandy Spaulding know via email.

Speaking of volunteers, it’s time to nominate our 2015 “Walker of the Year”. Any club member can be nominated. Submit your nominations with a brief write-up to Butch Spaulding by October 15th, so that the nominations can be published in our Nov-Dec newsletter. We’ll be trying out a new system for voting this year, so that all club members can participate, even if they can’t make the December club meeting.

Coming up in September

The ever-popular Breakfast Walk will take place at Zorinsky Lake, near 156th and F Streets, on Saturday morning from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. on September 12th. Walkers should be off the 5k or 10k trails by 2 p.m. Those coming later in the morning should count on eating before they head out on the trail. Please bring a ready-to-eat breakfast item to share – no cooking facilities are available. Fun walkers pay $1.50, while those wanting AVA/IVV Credit pay $3.

The club’s September meeting will take place on Monday, September 14th, a week later than our usual 1st Monday, due to the Labor Day Holiday. We’ll have speakers from Restoration Exchange of Omaha to give us some South Omaha history in preparation for our October walk. These speakers are fantastic and are a must-hear! Meetings take place at 7 p.m. at Morning Star Lutheran Church at 311 S. 85th St. (near Methodist Hospital). Our speakers will talk during the first portion of the meeting for 15 – 30 minutes, followed by a brief business meeting and will close with refreshments.

July and August Activities

A capacity crowd of 20 showed up at Ted and Wally’s in Omaha’s Old Market on Monday, July 13th. Participants report that it was a “tasteful” experience.

Club members Butch and Sandy Spaulding organized a spontaneous group walk of the Bennington Lakes Year Round walk on Saturday, July 18th. A total of 7 folks enjoyed the gardens at the Start Point, and beat most of the day’s heat by walking early in the day. Want a walking partner for any of our year rounds? Send us an email at netrailblazers@gmail.com and we’ll put the word out!

Our next scheduled club activity is a group walk of the Ashland Year Round on Saturday, August 15th at 8:30 a.m. Save some time in your schedule to have lunch at Cheri O’s and/or a visit to the SAC Museum nearby! The organizer for this event is club president Mel Bohn, who can be reached by personal email or by the club email at netrailblazers@gmail.com.

Our regular season of Traditional or Regular Events begins in September. If you didn’t get flyers for our first 4 walks of the season, let us know! More information to be posted in September.

Too hot? Too cold? Try walking INDOORS!

Our newest Year Round Event opened today at 7 a.m. at the Westroads Mall, thanks to Point-of-Contact (POC) Sandy Spaulding and the AmericInn, which is graciously serving as our Start Point. The AmericInn is located at 9720 W Dodge Rd, Omaha, NE 68114, which is just east of the Westroads Mall in Omaha, The entrance to the mall is from the parking area between JCPenney’s and Dick’s, which is on the NE side of the mall, along N. 98th Street, just north of Dodge Streets. For those unfamiliar with the area, the roads around the mall do circle around, so if you miss an entrance, you can drive to the next entrance and make your way back.

See AVA website Event Details for this walk for better directions on how to reach the Start Point.

Once inside, see if you can find Snow White’s mirror or check out where the new food court will be. The mall opens at 7 a.m. so that walkers can avoid the shopping crowds.

Raindrops keep falling on . . . Ashland

Salt Creek in Ashland is forecast to rise above flood stage over the next couple of days, which means the first 2k of the Ashland, Nebraska 10k YRE may be inaccessible by foot. Before she left town for the AVA convention, the Point of Contact for the walk had re-routed the walk due to construction on 14th Street (main N/S road in town), but not for the flooding that is occurring while she’s gone.

Suggestion: walk the route backwards and use the map to get back to the Start Point before crossing 14th Street to go east on the north end of town. (This makes sense if you’re looking at the map, really!) The rest of the town is unaffected and it’s a *great* walk, which is why the club is walking it in August.

June news

We welcome travelers on their way to and from the 2016 AVA Biennial Convention being held in Salem, Oregon! We also wish our club members and friends on their way to the convention safe journeys and great walks.

Our next event is the National Trails Day event, being held between 8:30 and 10:00 a.m. at the Chalco Hills Recreation Area Visitor’s Center just off of Giles Road at 154th St. The Papio-Missouri River NRD is opening the building just for us during those times, so that folks can register and start walking at their own pace during that time. We’re borrowing the stamp from the Chalco Hills YRE Walk Box during that time and we’ll have a special 5K route that starts from the Visitor’s Center.

Also on hand will be our new luggage tags for $5, free samples courtesy of the National Trails Day folks, and a great free selection of older awards. Those wanting AVA/IVV credit for the walk pay $3 – everyone else is free! Come join us and celebrate walking while in a great natural setting.

Finally, Jim McGahan has put together a pictorial plethora of pleasures in PDF from the last week of the Grand Island YRE, which has been in operation for the past 20 years. Jim adds that our walking friend Charlie Gentile should be in these photos, but missed that opportunity by just hours. Check it out here: The Final Four

More showers, more walks!

May has been a pretty rainy month so far this year, but that hasn’t stopped our club from taking part in events. The May 9th walk at Standing Bear Lake brought out 67 walkers to walk a quickly re-routed walk around the flooded lake. Here are pictures of two groups of walkers:

Boy Scouts, leaders, family and friends at the checkpoint

The YRE in Grand Island is now closed, but a steady stream of folks went to walk with Jim and Martha McGahan during the past week. Words are insufficient to express our gratitude for their years of service!

The last 13 folks to ever walk this sanctioned walk, assembled outside the now-closed Skagway store.

Butch Spaulding takes the Grand Island YRE walk box from Jim and Martha McGahan

You don’t have to be an AVA member to walk our walks (or even a club member), but one of the benefits of membership is receiving their publication, The American Wanderer. Long-time contributor Jim Goeltz submitted club news to TAW, and featured our very own club secretary, Tricia Abel! What a nice write-up for a nice lady. See June TAW article on NWFT and Tricia Abel. (Sorry, had to cut up the newsprint article to make it fit onto a single page!)

But, what about walking???

Remember we have the National Trails Day event coming up at the Chalco Hills Visitor Center on Saturday, June 6th between 8:30 and 10:00 a.m. We’ll be borrowing the box from its normal Start Point for the duration, but promise to get it back promptly!
Our YREs are still waiting for you! Check out our interactive Map to find a walk in Nebraska, visit AVA Interactive YRE Map to find walks around the country and of course, the GDMVA’s special walks (see GDMVA 30th Anniversary article in TAW) are available until June 30th!

Just gotta walk! April walking news

Fear not! We’ve got lots of great opportunities for you to walk. Check out any of our Year Round Events (time is ticking on the Grand Island event – see this post.

For North Central Region events from now until the end of the year (always more being added!) check April 1 2015 North Central Region Walks to come for the latest listings.

Luckily, we are pretty centrally located, so there’s always plenty to do with the clubs to our south. Check out https://clayplattetrackers.org/calendar.html for a list of their upcoming Group Walks and their first Traditional Event of the year in Olathe, KS on April 25th.

Those folks are pretty fantastic about supporting other clubs. Check out this Clay-Platte Trackers walking weekend with GDMVA for details on how the Clay-Platte Trackers are going to host a weekend of walks in conjunction with the Greater Des Moines Volkssport Association’s 30th Anniversary events! Our club is making carpooling arrangements to walk with the GDMVA in the morning (see this link for details and note the alternate start point for the morning of April 18th!). If you haven’t let Butch Spaulding know that you want a ride (or want to drive), let him know or email us right away!