Hiking Atlanta in a Year: Hikes 1 and 2 and lots of pictures

Aaron and I will not be traveling quite as much as we normally do this year. It's not a bad thing; in fact, our long-term plan will have us on the road more often. But I need more adventuring this year.

I bought this book: Hiking Atlanta's Hidden Forests: Intown and Out. I like it because the hikes are so geographically focused; all 60 hikes are within 30 miles of Atlanta. Many of them are new to me, though I've hiked the Chattahoochee and Kennesaw Mountain trails pretty thoroughly.

And so my adventure was born. I love themed trips where you collect all of something in your adventure. Aaron and I want to visit every Grand Canyon of X state. We want to drive all of Highway 1 from Key West to Fort Kent, ME. And now I want to hike all the hikes in my new book this year.

I hiked Leita Thompson Memorial Park on Sept. 10. It was a familiar hike; in fact, it was where we hiked for my birthday in January of 2015 with Zahra and the Caseys and Josh in his bow tie. :) It was where Cynthia, Jenn, and I hiked and talked and talked and talked very recently. But on the l0th, I hiked it alone. It was overcast, I listened to my QM lectures, I ran a little, and I avoided, pretty unsuccessfully, an annoying leaf-blowing tractor.

I posted all this on Facebook, but SCREW THAT.

The real new info is this: I hiked a new trail yesterday. I did the Historic Hill Trail and the Trestle Rock Multi-Use Trail at Old Rope Mill Park off exit 9 of 575. It seemed to be focused on mountain bikers (the two short trails I did were walking only), so it makes me a little nervous to contemplate walking the other two. However, checking them off the list in my book and completing this year-long, put-all-the-trails-in-a-virtual-bucket project is worth getting run down by a speeding mountain bike, so I'll go back and do those two as well.

The hiking was very pleasant on this cloudy, cool, Thursday morning. I walked alone, listening to a Freakanomics podcast, then a Buddhist Geeks podcast, then a lecture by Pema Chodron about getting hooked by shenpa and how to get unhooked. I walked very slowly, as I've been sick, and I looked at all the things. Here are some cool ones I saw:

Some of the most fun and cheerfully colorful graffiti I've ever seen:

Under this old railroad bridge:

SO MANY WILDFLOWERS! The dry ones that come in fall and will last, slowly losing all their color and becoming texture alone, in fall and winter.

Beautiful views of the creek:

And the happy, happy dogs in the creek:

The place was full of sycamore trees, which are jumping I did in my childhood into piles of their leaves. The light on the leaves on the sycamores was the most lovely thing I saw, but alas, I couldn't quite catch it with my camera.

A pair of young people let me take a picture of their hammock set-up, and they complimented me on my TARDIS phone case, so I know they were the best kind of people. 

The bridge over the creek:

Proof that fall is coming to GA. I usually see fall drop on us like an anvil; I get up one morning and the leaves are all red, or we skip that and trees go from green to bare. But I caught these leaves in the middle of changing color, and I was so pleased to imagine the last little packets of chlorophyll hanging on to dear life.