When it's cold and snowy and the day after Christmas, it can be hard to get out on the road and into the woods.
And not too much easier to set out into said cold and snow (tho' not much) toward the Barnes & Noble store at Tanglewood Mall. But with the prospect of a warm, indoor, served lunch somewhere in the vicinity, The Day Hiker bundled up overly well and we made our way over parts of the Murray Run trail through the woods and then along pretty Winding Way Road toward our distinctly urban destination with no views whatsoever.
First lunch choice was somewhere we'd never been, but the coinciding of our arrival with the kickoffs for the 1 pm NFL games meant that Buffalo Wild Wings had a half-hour wait. Who knew? So we "settled" for the nearby Bellacino's, where we have become fans of the steak grinder.
At Barnes & Noble, by the way, the little Folk section in the CDs continues to shrink in tandem with the other categories of CDs, as DVDs and Blu-rays crowd out the disked music space to a distressing degree, at least for the person who has undergone the successive stresses of switching from vinyl to cassette to CD, but has made no entry into tune downloading, which seems, you know, so scattered and random: You hike along the AT, you want the dang guidebook in your hand to read about any section you want; you listen to Fred Eaglesmith, you want the dang CD to listen to it the way he put it together.
To head home, we took the even-more-urban route along Franklin Road to Towers Shopping Center, but then did take the non-Brandon route through the pretty Oak Hill neighborhood.
The ol' urban walk from home to Tanglewood Mall area and back. About 6 miles.
How to get there: From our house, step out the door and down the hill.
Hike: December 26, 2010