Day 1 – Wandering around the Quarry

So Day 1 of this adventure went pretty well. Wesley wasn’t feeling well so Patricia stayed home with him while Penny and I hit the trails. We started with a quick side trip to the Trailside Museum to pick up some trail maps. I checked in with the Ranger at the desk to see if they had any advice on how to tackle all the trails in one season. She had the great advice of focusing on the trails along the outskirts of the park early in the season because a lot of them get overgrown by the time Summer is in full swing. She specifically pointed out the Fowl Meadow area as one that gets overgrown quickly. She also let me know about the Friends of Blue Hills and their 125 Mile patch. We also checked out the new Otter enclosure and a very sleepy Otter getting some sun time. Jumped back into the car and headed to Quincy Quarry which we’ve hiked a whole bunch of times. The place was packed with climbers and a crew had even setup a tightrope walk across the quarry. We also encountered our first missing trail marker. Number 4229 was no where to be found. In fact the trails weren’t very easy to find either. I just started using All Trails to track our progress and if you click through and look at the map you can see how we did quite a bit of wandering and double backing in an attempt to hike the actual trails. Things went smoother when we crossed the road to go along some of hiking trails we’ve never been to before. We actually found trail marker 4236, but 4238 was also disappointingly missing. I think I’m gonna grab a small white board so we can make up our own marker signs when we can’t find them on the trail. Penny was happy that we relocated the remnants of the car wreckage they remembered from a hike years ago. We also ran into the My Pillow Guy / Conspiracy Theorist / Underqualified Presidential Advisor / Mike Lindell… well at least his cardboard cutout, which was kinda weird. Then Penny came across a stump throne and started striking some royalty style poses. The ruling class mentality must have gone to their head because they were getting pooped out after just over the 2 mile mark so we wrapped up the loop we were on and headed back to the car. They are gonna need to work on their stamina if they plan on keeping up with me all summer.