This week's Outdoor Enthusiast Next Door is Michelle Finch. Michelle is an avid hiker and keeps an excellent blog about her hiking adventures at Hip Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Check it out for detailed trip reports and colorful photos.

Why do you travel? And why outdoor/adventure type travel?

Usually it's for the change of scenery, and environment. Local hiking is great and an opportunity to see places in your back yard you would never get to see by car, but when we went to Hawaii to hike, it was a totally different beast from hiking in the Rockies. Even when we travel to other provinces/states in the NW area, there are enough differences to make the hikes unique.

When I travel, it's almost always for the outdoor activities. I've never been interested in most "tourist" things people do. Eventually, instead of thinking about places we wanted to go, I started planning around places we wanted to hike — it was totally unconscious.

Tell me about your last outdoor/adventure trip.

Every weekend is a trip to Banff, Alberta, but the last full-out trip was to Hawaii. We spent three days on Maui and three on O'ahu. Because it was partly business we didn't get to as much on O'ahu, but in Maui we were treated to a guided hike by a company called Hike Maui. I'm a prairie girl, brought up on the edge of the Rockies — a rain forest hike was beyond anything I'd done before. Instead of dirt and dust at our feet, it was muddy and humid. We went through a bamboo forest and a botanical garden where our guide picked star fruit off the trees for us. I don't think I recognized any of the vegetation we hiked through, it was like information overload. We hiked to a lagoon, jumped in. In the Rockies there are very few bodies of water you want to hike to and swim in, unless it's a heat wave.

What influenced you to take this trip?

Strangely, the Hawaii trip fell into our laps as a result of my husband's work. There was little time to prepare or even decide where to go. It was a unique situation — not much adventurous about it, I'm afraid. ;-)