Birthday Trail Ride

Yesterday, February 6th, was my birthday.  I have this aversion to working on my birthday so I usually take a vacation day and stay home to do whatever I want. :)  So naturally, I stayed home and began my day with a sculpting session on a piece that I've been working on.  Then I went to Sears and bought a new power drill.  My cordless Craftsman of 18 years finally bit the dust and with all the projects going on around the house I simply cannot be without one!  Last but not least, I took Daatje out on our trails.  We were out for just under 2 hours and covered just under 7 miles.

There's a large field at the East Road trail access which the property owners have invited me to ride on, as long as it's not haying season.  The ground is a little hard now, but it's still fun to walk around the stone wall bordered field with the classic New England farm house in the background.



In the woods not far from the farm house, one of the stone walls across the trail climbed quite a steep hill.  We bushwhacked to the top and I tried to get a photo of the wall as it laced between the trees, straight as an arrow!  Hard to see in the photo with the trees in the way, but that wall goes on as far as the eye can see.  How the farmers were able to lay such lengths of stone walls in such straight lines I'd love to know. :)



The trail is the dark line crossing the center of the photo.

 We kinda found ourselves in the middle of the thicket at the top of the hill, so after a bit of contemplation on how to get down and back to the trail, we executed the plan and were on our way again.

I wanted to scope out the ice situation so when the snow fell I'd have a good idea of what was underneath and where.  We stopped at the Spillway and I took this quick clip of the bubbling Kelly Brook.

After exploring a new trail that branched into two directions (both dead ended into private property) we headed back up the hill to the farm house with the big field.

The gentleman farmer was out loading split logs into his pick up (they have a wood burning furnace outdoors) and he waved to me as I was coming up the logging road.  So nice to have such friendly, welcoming land owners!