Local Author Book Launch

Saturday, March 5 from 2-4 p.m.

Sheepscot General Store will host a book launch party for Uphill Both Ways: Hiking toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail on Saturday, March 5 from 2-4 pm.

The launch party will feature a meet and greet, reading, and book signing with author Andrea Lani. There will be treats, and a drawing for a print of one of the book’s illustrations.

In Uphill Both Ways, Whitefield resident Andrea Lani shuns the typical family vacation and instead drags her husband and three children on a six-week, 500-mile hike through the Rocky Mountains. Frustrated by parenting, tortured by a toxic work environment, and homesick for tall mountains and big skies, Lani quits her job, packs her family into their Volvo, and sets off to hike the Colorado Trail exactly twenty years after she and her husband hiked the same trail at the beginning of their relationship. 

Along the way they encounter spectacular wildflowers, endearing wildlife, and far too many other hikers, while experiencing scorching heat, torrential thunderstorms, and the first nip of winter. Lani’s kids grow in unimaginable ways, and she begins to exercise disused smile muscles, despite the challenges of hiking in a middle-aged body, maintaining her children’s safety and happiness, and contending with marital discord. As she inches her way along the trail, Lani learns that being a slow hiker doesn’t make her a bad hiker, and she begins to uncover the secret to happiness.

Andrea Lani is a graduate of College of the Atlantic and the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program. Her writing about family and the natural world has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Spire: The Maine Journal of Conservation and Sustainability, A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis, and The Maine Review. She is a Maine Master Naturalist and a member of the Maine Master Naturalist Program’s board of directors, and she’s a senior editor at the online journal Literary Mama. Lani lives in Whitefield with her family.

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Community Supported Agriculture has always been a key piece of who we are and what we do. We believe this partnership is much more than a simple financial obligation; it is a bond that reflects a social and economic philosophy built around good food in our cherished community. For more information and to sign up visit our CSA page!

Upcoming Events:

• Wine Tasting with SoPo Wines: March 10 from 5-7 pm

• Maine Maple Weekend: March 26 & 27

Photographs by Chip Dillon of Blue Horse Photography.