Time passes.

We are beginning our 17th year of walking down to the beach every morning to watch the sunrise.

We can trace our morning walks back to early 1996.

We had started several months earlier, pushed into it by a friend and neighbor. At first, we were tired after a few blocks, but built up to a regular walk of just about 3 miles per day.

We can date these regular daily walks because we attended the annual conference of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences at the Riviera Hotel/Casino in Las Vegas in mid-March 1996, and by then we were already into regular walking every day. We both remember going out for daily walks while there in Vegas, on those very long city blocks between stops along the strip. So we know we were already into the morning routine, and have arbitrarily set our beginning date sometime in February 1996.

Since then, according to my calculations, we likely walked more than 16,000 miles.

That’s three miles per day, probably 345 days a year, subtracting days when we were traveling, sick, or facing weather that was just too wild to go out.

We’ve finished 16 years, and looking forward to another 16.

The photographs are a bonus.