Welcome to The Family Stride

There's a walk I keep thinking about.

It was the last day of a family trip to the Cotswolds — a trip we'd saved and planned for years as a way to celebrate our ten-year anniversary. We were at a farm park on a quiet summer morning, just the three of us, surrounded by wildflowers and rolling hills and the kind of stillness that feels almost impossible to find in regular life. Nobody was looking at a screen. Nobody was in a hurry. We were just there, together, completely present in a way that doesn't happen nearly enough.

On the walk back, one of us said it out loud: what if we came back and actually walked it?

And just like that, a dream was born.

Hi — we're The Family Stride. We're a busy family of three from Connecticut, and we are on a mission to walk two of England's most iconic long-distance trails: the Cotswold Way (102 miles, Bath to Chipping Campden) and the Coast to Coast path (190 miles, St. Bees to Robin Hood's Bay). We are not athletes, we are not experts, and we do not have unlimited time or energy. We are also, it should be said, not exactly a family that roughs it -- the inn-to-inn format, where you walk between villages and someone else handles your luggage, is not a compromise for us. It's the whole point. What we do have is a deep love of the outdoors, a family that genuinely likes spending time together, and a dream that's too good not to chase.

This blog — this whole project, really — is the record of how we get there.

Right now, we're at the very beginning. We're lacing up on local Connecticut trails, building our fitness and our confidence one weekend walk at a time. Down the road there's a Vermont inn-to-inn hike we're eyeing as a proving ground, a scouting trip through northern England we're already dreaming about, and eventually — boots on the ground in the Cotswolds and beyond. We're going to document every step of it here honestly, including the hard days, the wrong turns, and the moments when the couch almost won.

If I'm being honest, this project is doing a few things at once for our family. It's giving us a reason to get outside consistently, which — if you're also someone who struggles to keep a wellness routine — you'll understand is harder than it sounds. Having a goal this big, tied to something this meaningful, makes it easier to actually show up for it. It's also given our son a reason to get genuinely excited about hiking, which, trust me, was not always the case. For a while every trail suggestion was met with a hard sell. Now? He's all in. Watching that shift has been one of the best surprises of this whole thing already.

One of the “boring” hikes we took our son on before this project inspired him to lace up his boots.

Why does this matter enough to write about? Because nature is the thing that brings our family back to itself. Life moves fast — faster than any of us planned for — and the trail slows it back down. We want our son to grow up knowing that his family chased a big dream together and didn't just talk about it. We're also in what feels like a golden window of parenting -- the tweens, where he's old enough to be a real companion on an adventure like this and young enough that he still wants to be. We're not taking a single step of it for granted. And somewhere at the end of all of this, there's a book waiting to be written. We're already living the first chapter.

We're so glad you found us — whether you've known us for years or stumbled here for the first time today. Pull up a chair, follow along, and come walk with us.

The best is still ahead.

— The Family Stride

Our First Stride: The Bog Walk