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Day’s Verse:
I have fought the good fight, I have finished (R)the course, I have kept the faith; in the future there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day; and not only to me, but also to all who have loved His appearing.
2 Timothy 4:7-8
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Today Ian and I originally planned to go for a hike we read about in one of our hiking books. But last night we impulsively answered Dave and Sharron’s call for a games night, and those always last much longer than I normally stay up. We left their house at midnight and got home at (this is my very sleepy memory) 12:50. On the way home Ian and I participated in an inspired discussion about why biology and engineering attract different types of personalities, but now I can’t remember any of our clever insights.

That meant that this morning started much later than we anticipated yesterday during our planning session. As fleibile…er, flexible adults, however, we decided to walk on what we thought was a rail train in Sudbury instead of driving the two hours to the Connecticut hike. We accordingly left, I with my camera in the hopes of finding some interesting scenery, even in the heart of traditional suburban Massachusetts.

Looking back, I probably should have taken pictures of the houses we walked by; but at the time I never thought of it, and when I did I felt odd thinking of photographic somebody else’s home without permission (and getting permisson — well, banish the thought). Plus, most photos would require going right onto the property or they would turn out as complete snapshots. The upshot is I took a few pictures of the rail trail, but nothing came out particularly nicely.

We walked. And we walked, eventually for an hour and a half, before returning to our car. Unfortunately, only a small proportion of that walk actually took place on anything like a rail trail (photo above); there certainly were rails there, and maybe somebody planned to turn it into a nice trail some time, but we found mostly rusted train tracks with little plants growing between them. But we doggedly pushed through most plants and found the going fairly easy for a few minutes. Then the tracks ended at a plant wholesaler (photo at right), where rows and rows of plants in pots sat sunning themselves and the fertilizer runoff produced amazing cattails in the ditch along the side of the property. We tried to follow the rail line, but through this property it had become so excessively and densely overgrown that nothing less than a machete would have allowed us passage.

Since I forgot my machete at home, we turned instead to Union Avenue, which provided us with a connection to Sudbury Center even if it lacked anything amenable like a sidewalk. So we eventually found the Sudbury Heritage Park, a lovely green space with benches in the shade, a eutrophic pond, and little paths that took us back out to Union Avenue. We decided that, even if the town lacked much of a center, it still was quite a nice place to walk around. (And to show how quirky and nice Sudbury is, I point you to this page; I calculate a total of 2,258.) After resting in the shade for a bit, we walked back along Concord Road to Route 20, commenting on the well-kept old houses. We saw many homes built between 1790 and 1850, and they all had the most wonderful porches. I love a good porch.

Route 20 led us back to our car, where we agreed that the slightly breezy 75° weather could not have provide a more propitious backdrop for our Sudbury ramble.