Go Take a Hike!

Peter's basketball team has been practicing a lot this season at two of the more northerly elementary schools in Chapel Hill (as opposed to his Pee Wee team, which practiced almost exclusively at two elementary schools very close to the house). Getting him to and from these practices takes me on a road I don't drive on all that regularly, and I noticed there were nice shiny new signs indicating trailheads.

These trails have been around forever, and are part of a word of mouth network of hiking and biking trails in some University owned land in northern Chapel Hill. UNC wants to build a rather large research campus in the same general area, and there's been much opposition to it from the neighborhoods nearby; the University has made the trail system a greenspace offering to try to make the idea of the research campus more palatable.

Not sure how it's working with the locals, but the kids and I went on a hike there this afternoon, and we certainly liked it! We played around in the woods for about an hour, mainly staying on two major trails, but occasionally branching off to a connector trail, or to cross Bolin Creek (which I only did once, but the kids did about 57,000 times).

It was good fun. Grace slipped into the creek twice and got her foot wet. We saw tons of dogs (all VERY well behave). We actually saw a tree fall in the forest (and yes, it did make a sound). We heard frogs but could never find them.

Grace wanted to walk home from there, until I told her it would be about 4 miles!