Hike 38: Magruder Branch Trail

Chris and I did this for our anniversary celebration!

It starts really close to our home, at a rec park with a huge soccer field and baseball diamond too.  You have to walk from the parking lot to a paved loop trail that lots of people use for running before you get to the turnoff to the dirt hiking trail.  It's pretty straightforward with some areas that are a bit overgrown (I made Chris go first in those sections).  Eventually you pass this open field area behind a bunch of giant mansions and then you run into Seneca Creek.

 It looks like you should be able to continue across the creek to the Seneca Greenway Trail, which we've done from the other end.  It was a nice spot to munch on our PBJ sandwiches.

On our way back, Chris picked a nice ripe blackberry - it was actually really sweet!  He really wanted to see a black bear, but no such luck.  :)

Hike 24: Watkins Regional Park

This place is fantastic for kids!  There's a great nature center that you start at and lots of little trails. 

The longest one is called "Spicebush Trail" and it takes you the whole way around the park.  It's a little overgrown and I don't think many people walk the trail.  I was periodically freaked out by spiderwebs strung across the trail, but it wasn't awful.  The book says the trails are "mostly names, signposted, and color coded" and that's true for the most part but sometimes the trails end very abruptly in a field of nothing. 

And Spicebush Trail sort of dead ends into a parking lot and I never found the rest of the trail, so I wandered around and eventually followed a road back to the nature center.  But that's when I discovered the best part!  They have an old farm that wasn't open that day, but you can wander around outside the fence and they have PEACOCKS!  I took pictures and videotapes for a good twenty minutes.  They were so cool.  They also have turkeys and chickens and probably some mammals too, but I couldn't see them.