CEDAR FALLS - Denny Mills and Darrel Buchholz may be retired, but they have a standing appointment to keep every weekday morning.

By 6:30 a.m. the men are seated in their regular booth at the Waffle Stop. Mills has oatmeal and Buchholz munches on a bagel or scrambled eggs while they talk local politics and trade insults with the rest of the morning crew. As the clock's hour hand inches closer to 8, Mills produces a map and both men lean forward, tuning out the bull session.

They call themselves the Cedar Falls Streetwalkers, and it's time to select the day's route.

"We've walked close to half the town so far," Mills said last week, tracing his finger along the city's blue-veined streets. "By Christmas, we'll have covered all of Cedar Falls."

It's an impressive goal, and one the men stumbled onto quite by accident. Buchholz is a longtime walker who exercises to control his diabetes. When Mills injured his back in March and needed a break from basketball and running, he joined Buchholz for a few morning jaunts through College Square Mall.

Then, spring fever set in.

"The weather was so nice," explained Buchholz, 64. "We started walking through the neighborhoods by the Waffle Stop."

The men inched farther and farther from the diner. One day, Mills, 61, brought "The Map" to breakfast and used a highlighter to mark all the streets they'd covered.

"We saw we'd done close to a quarter of the town," he said. "We thought, well, wouldn't that be something if we finish this thing off."

So the retirees kept pounding the pavements, admiring historic homes, comparing landscaping techniques and making friendly chit-chat with fellow passersby. They discovered Gloria Street - a dead end with no homes - and stumbled upon a creek bisecting Panther Lane.

"It's amazing, because you miss so much when you're driving," Buccholz said. "You don't see how the houses are built, or how they keep their yard. It all goes by too fast."

Each day, the men walk for an hour-and-a-half, covering three to four miles. On Fridays, they sometimes hit a yard sale or two. Mills, an ultralight pilot from Cedar Falls, purchases stuffed animals. He drops the toys to children during his flights over the area's Amish communities. Buccholz once scored a laptop for $35.

"He fixed it up for me," the rural Janesville resident said, nodding his head toward Mills. "He's the computer guru of the group."

The men didn't know each other until they both started dining at the Waffle Stop. Mills was a salaried John Deere employee, while Buccholz worked for the Teamsters union. "We're opposites, black and white, that way," Mills said, laughing.

"But Denny and I, we kinda clicked," Buccholz added.

Next month, during the summer's warmest days, the pair will tackle the city's historic neighborhoods, chock full of shade trees. In the fall, they'll stroll through downtown. By the end of their tour, the men will have covered more than 100 miles on foot. They say they're in no rush to finish.

"I'm just curious to see what's around the next corner, to see what's over the next hill," Mills said. "You come across something new every day."