The Women Who Showed Us the Way

Before the website, before the trail plans, before our family sat down together and decided that the Cotswold Way was something we were actually going to do — there were two women whose work quietly planted the seeds of all of it. I don't think The Family Stride exists without them, and it felt wrong to get too far down this road without saying so out loud.

Katherine May — Author, The Electricity of Every Living Thing

I came to Katherine May sideways, the way you come to the things that end up mattering most.

It was the winter of 2021. We had been living with the reality of COVID for over a year, and our family was navigating some significant changes — Sam had been diagnosed with ASD just a few months earlier, in the late summer of 2020, and we were all still finding our footing. Into that particular winter came Wintering, May's meditation on rest, retreat, and the strange grace of difficult seasons. It connected with me on so many levels: the idea that our lives, like nature, move in seasons, and that after every winter there is a spring. The way she writes about finding beauty in the quiet and the cold, the way many Scandinavian cultures have long understood how to embrace. The book introduced me to the wheel of the year — the idea of marking the turning of nature's rhythms, honoring each season as it comes. It arrived at exactly the right moment.

My first introduction to Katherine May’s work, on a much needed retreat to the White Mountains with Steve in Winter of 2021.

She mentioned The Electricity of Every Living Thing in that book, and I knew immediately it had to be my next read.

That second book documents her solo journey along the South West Coast Path, all 630 miles of it, winding around the rugged edge of southwest England. But it's about so much more than a walk. It's about what happens when a woman who has spent her whole life feeling slightly out of step with the world discovers, mid-stride on a coastal path, that she is autistic. It's about nature as a place where a mind like hers — like ours — finally makes sense.

We are what is sometimes playfully called a "neuro-spicy" family, which manifests differently for each of us. We have spent a lot of time navigating a world that isn't always designed for the way our brains work. And here was this woman, walking the edge of England, writing about it with such honesty and beauty that I found myself underlining passages and thinking — yes, this is exactly it. Nature does something for us that nothing else quite replicates. It meets us where we are. It doesn't ask us to be different.

Katherine May showed me that a journey like this could be about more than miles. It could be about understanding yourself more deeply with every step. That idea lives at the heart of everything we're building here.

Helene Sula — Helene in Between

If Katherine May gave me the deeper why, Helene Sula gave me the spark of possibility.

I found Helene on Instagram — as you do — and fell immediately down the rabbit hole of her Cotswold Way content. Here was a real person, documenting every mile of that 102-mile path with warmth, humor, and stunning visuals, making it feel not just beautiful but doable. Watching her walk those honey-stone villages and sweeping escarpments I'd fallen in love with on our family trip, I kept thinking: we could do that. We should do that.

Helene has a gift for making the extraordinary feel accessible. For those of us who love England deeply but don't always know how to take the leap from dreaming to doing, her content is genuinely transformative. She's now preparing for the Coast to Coast — the very same path that sits at the top of our own dream list — and we'll be following every step of her journey with equal parts inspiration and anticipation.

Two women, two trails, one family completely changed by both.

If you haven't read Katherine May’s books yet, please do. And if you want to fall in love with the Cotswold Way before you've ever set foot on it, go find Helene at @heleneinbetween. Tell her The Family Stride sent you.

We are so grateful to both of them for lighting the way.

— Laura, Steve, and Sam, The Family Stride