I am very blessed to live in a place where I can walk out my backdoor and be in nature. I love hiking with the dogs. I almost never see another person. It's peaceful and I have the opportunity to clear my head. My usual trek is to head northward to a little creek. Sophie always jumps in and hunts for tadpoles, even in the winter. Then we continue to the powerline right of way. It's been mowed recently, so it's easy to walk. From here we either turn left and head toward Mt. Gilead Church Road and cut across Bam Bam's house (actually, where his house used to be--he and the house are long gone). OR, we go right and pick up an old logging road that takes us to another creek and a bridge. The logging road is grown over with young long leaf pines and the bridge is about to collapse. There's one more route we sometimes go...we head east on the logging road that is right behind the house. It runs behind all the houses on our side of Hudson Woods Road. Where the road forks, we go left and follow it to the end. It's a pretty good road even now because the people on 4-wheelers use it sometimes. There are a couple of deer blinds that some hunters built and abandoned. They're falling apart. There's also a little shed of sorts that appears to be a fancier deer blind. I never see any hunters, but my walks don't occur during prime hunting hours. I know there are a lot of deer out there. I see their tracks everywhere. And Sophie manages to locate and roll in their poop. Disgusting. She can't help herself. I try to get outside when the weather is good. The best hiking time is late fall to mid spring--after the undergrowth has died down and before the spiders start building webs everywhere. Dad used to spend a lot of time wandering around in the woods surrounding his house. Now I understand why.
