I may have recently spent a four hour car ride playing Mario Run, and am now beginning to talk like a fictional Italian plumber. Also, I suck at video games. I keep playing but I never get any better! Kind of like blogging … oh, wait. I don’t keep blogging. I just pop in a couple of times a year lately and say I’m going to blog regularly and never actually do. The evidence would suggest I also suck at blogging.

It isn’t that I haven’t had anything to talk about, exactly. My adventures have been just few and far between. Hiking has turned into something I squeeze in here and there at a park near my house so my hound dog can get out and smell something other than our backyard. Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Well, Proust, I took new eyes to my local park, but I ran out of pairs after about the tenth trip. Between last summer’s overwhelming heat and all the extra hours I’ve been working on weekends, I’ve gone back to a pretty boring routine.

But guess what? Summer is coming. (Take that, Starks.) I’m sweeping away the cobwebs and getting some adventures planned. Because, really, if I don’t start doing something again, my soul is going to wither and die. That’s rather dramatic, I know. But I have a feeling if you’re reading this blog, you know exactly the feeling I’m talking about. Plus, I need something to distract me from graduate school applications. Otherwise, I’ll keep imagining the review board members reading my essay, laughing and then passing it around to other departments so they can laugh, too.

When I planned to start blogging again in the fall, I had about 10 posts outlined, several of them for trips that have still yet to be taken. I plotted routes to Lake Erie, Lake Michigan and a half-dozen other parks and historically interesting spots around Ohio and Indiana. Then I stopped to think for a minute; there are so many interesting things right in my own backyard. And then I thought, “Cassie, why didn’t you think of all these things over the last few months?”

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to polish the old stories that have been languishing in my blogging folder. I’ll work out the kinks on topics such as breathless-friendly hikes in Hocking Hills and how Mammoth Cave changed the way I see the Earth. And then, my friends, we’ll embark on something new.

Craving more adventure between posts? Check out Instagram @BreathlessAdventurer.