Merrimack River Walk

My husband, Obo is a high school teacher. Lately, he’s been teaching AP Psychology, but his background is in history. And with his background running camps, experiential education programs and his love of the outdoors, he’s the perfect fit to advise his school’s Outing Club.

I don’t usually join the Outing Club on their adventures (most often due to the boys), but this weekend was a fairly easy hike out to the Merrimack River. The boys came with us – Youngest rode in the backpack the whole way, but Oldest hiked along with us. Which is pretty impressive as we did a full two hours of hiking, not including our little lunch break beside the river. It helped that he had some high school kids to glom onto.

It was a chilly, windy day but really lovely in the sun. I kept taking my jacket on and off, never quite comfortable. You can see in the picture of me and Youngest that I kept it draped over me when we weren’t moving.

This was our view of the Merrimack River during lunch:

There was far less bird life around than we expected – could have been due in part to the wind. I heard Pine Warblers near the entrance of the property both on the way in and the way out. Chickadees, Titmice and White-breasted Nuthatches were plentiful and I heard but didn’t see an Eastern Phoebe.  There were one or two other calls I couldn’t recognize, and that was about it.  We didn’t even run into very many people. On our way back we saw a few folks out with their dogs, but we were clearly the only group solely out for a hike.

Tangentially, I have a collection of pictures (that I’ve taken) of signs. I’m not entirely sure why, but I have a thing for signs – particularly the odder ones. It’s definitely one of my weirder collections. I got to add to it this weekend with this, which I’ve titled “Which way?”:

It’s a good thing we knew where we were going….