I visited my cousins in a little town in Germany recently that is surrounded by walking paths all through town and in the surrounding hills. The town is filled with clinics that Germans get to go to to recover from surgery and other health issues because the walking and nature is so peaceful. Wish I lived there :-(
Kettering in England is a typical town — few people would recommend visiting it. Look at the official (government-produced) map: http://binged.it/1SDXCaH (the layer should say "Ordnance Survey", I hope it works outside the UK). The pink dotted/dashed lines are walking, cycling or horseriding paths. There are lots!
Kettering was chosen at random. Scroll north and some pink lines have pink diamonds — these are long-distance leisure routes, often with some kind of theme or historical purpose to the route.
I spent a lot of time as a child touring the USA with my parents. The national parks were great! But outside these parks, are footpaths rare?
Rare? No. There are not a great number of regional paths, but there are lots of local paths in state/county/city parks, and in nature areas that are not so developed as to be called parks.
The regional path thing is changing somewhat as rail easements are converted to trails, but those tend to be a little bland.
There are also national trails like, for example, the Appalachian Trail (2,200 miles) and North Country Trail (4,600 miles planned, 2,700 miles completed).
The interesting thing about Germany is that small towns located in the forests (and they are LOTS of forest in Germany) are also centers for major engineering centres, some of these centres are European HQ.
For us who work in engineering, this makes it easy to live in the forest, and commute to work through the forests.
Don't know about the OP, but I visited Bad Kreuznach a few years ago which has a reputation for health/spas. They have public Saline Graduation Towers which offer a place to sit and breath in the mineral rich water droplets. Very soothing.
