A walk in the woods

No, this is not a reference to Bill Bryson's interesting book on the Appalachian trail (AT).  Speaking of which, our bridge friend Bob McCaw is out hiking the AT again (!).  You can keep track of his progress with his Trail Journal.

View Estabrook Woods in a larger map.

No, my title refers to a four-mile walk we did in Estabrook Woods (see map). Kim had asked me to plan a four-mile walk and when we got back to the car the GPS was showing 4.00 miles!  Total luck of course. Especially as the track shown here claims to be 4.33 miles. Strange -- it may be something to do with the conversion between formats.  My entire lifetime has been spent marveling at the way computer people (myself excepted, obviously) care nothing about the error bounds of measurements.  So, a point on the map is presumed to be exact, even though that makes the track appear jagged.  And if you look carefully, you'll notice that our return up the main track appears about 10m to the right of the way we came down it.  And also that the car had dropped a couple of hundred feet since we set out.  This should all be handled properly by the software, but of course it isn't.

But the dogs don't care about the precision of the GPS either.  They had a wonderful time, especially Jimmy who met some new friends (and tried to go home with them).  There was still snow on the ground and of course some wet patches to negotiate, but all in all a beautiful day.  We could feel virtuous when we got back.

Switching tack now... I've never been a fan of the humble parsnip.  I've always loved its relative the carrot but there's something about the taste of parsnips that disagrees with me.  But the good news is that I'm getting over it.  Like so many veggies, parsnips are health-giving in several ways.  Did you know that parsnips and carrots are part of a large family of flowers, the Apiaceae (also known as the Umbellifers), which contains many of the herbs with which we are so familiar?  However, it also includes the hemlock (that's to say Socrates' C.O.D., rather than the North American tree).

While this winter started out with lots of snow and while our garden in the backyard has had a blanket of snow all winter long, it turns out that we've ended (assuming no more, April Fools day notwithstanding) with just over 80", far short the record, set in the year (1995-6) Ella and David decided to try a New England winter for a change, of 108".  I'm expecting that in a day or two, we'll again be able to see the vegetable garden.