Hiking without gear though...that is becoming a passion. With nice poles (you don't need to spend a ton of money...ours are $50/pair...cheap by most serious hiker standards), good shoes and a day pack, we love to hit trails within a couple hours of our house.
What's becoming increasingly obvious is that we need to DOCUMENT where we have been. When we are sitting here at home trying to decide where to go, we find ourselves debating whether we've actually been to a spot already.
So, I'm dragging out one of my (many) blank books...which are still blank because no follow-through...and I'm going to jot down our hikes/travels/camps/Airbnbs so we know where we've been, which places we'd love to return to, and which we hope never to be back to again. And I'm gonna TRY to put them here, too. With at least ONE photo.
Here is 2017, cobbled together from Facebook posts. There may be some missing if I didn't post about them on FB, but this is the best information I can draw from:
February 12, 2017
Colonel Francis Beatty Park in Union County, NC
This park is about 20 minutes from our house. Here's the link to the park page. There is not much information there about the trails..namely, the length. The nearest I can tell, the park has about 4.35 miles of trails. They are beautifully maintained and hikers share them with mountain bikes, BUT...the trails TELL YOU which direction to walk around. If you follow the signs (and if bikers do, too), you will FACE mountain bikes so you won't get run over! We loved that. Major kudos to the planners for doing that. Not everyone follows those rules, but it certainly beats other places like the Springs Close Greenway and the Whitewater Center, where everyone goes any way they want, to their peril.
Francis Beatty is a popular spots for weddings, and there are plenty of sports fields around, so it's a great multi-use spot, but hikers don't feel too crowded.
February 18. 2017
Morrow Mountain State Park, Albemarle, NC
This park is about 90 minutes from our house. It took us that long to get there, but then about 2.5 hours to get home because we decided it would be cool to drive across country, rather than hitting the highways again. The address is Albemarle, but the tiny town of Badin is right there. Here is a link to the park page. We need to go back to this park. There are about 15 miles of trails and we hit a 3.9 mile loop that was all forest. We didn't feel up to climbing that day, so we didn't hit any of the mountain trails, where a lot of the views are. Morrow Mountain is in the Uwharrie National Forest, which we haven't really explored, either. We didn't really give this park a chance. Maybe we'll backpack there. They have some primitive sites that only about 2 miles in.
In February all the foliage is gone, so it's all black and white and of course we didn't hit a trail with a view. I took one photo:
With Badin right there, and being a little town, we just couldn't resist a stop there for lunch. We had lunch at a little pizza & Chinese place. I don't remember what I had, but before we had lunch, we stopped in an antique/junk store and got into conversation with the owner. She talked up the pizza place, remarking that she didn't expect the Chinese food to go over well in their sleepy little town, but everyone was surprised! The remarkable things that stuck with us in this town were:
1. It's pronounced Bae-din, not Bah-din. And it isn't that old. The town was established in 1913 when a French aluminum company bought property on the PeeDee river and open a plant. The little houses were built (with French drains, which are still there) to accommodate the workers. The town was not incorporated until 1990.
2. Reddy Kilowatt:
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