5/25/2020 - Marlborough to Ashland

May 25, 2020

Welcome to Susan's Bay Circuit Diary! This blog follows my adventures with my dog Sulu hiking the Bay Circuit Trail. Feel free to subscribe (see the little "subscribe" oval above). The rest of the past posts can be found using the little menu on the left. If you are curious how this all started, go here.

The no-go zone

I must take a moment to sing the praises of my Duluth Trading Company gardening vest. I carry in it the following: car key, headphones, poop bags, Sulu’s nose loop, full poop bags, handkerchief, and water bottle, with room for more stuff if I need it. So much better than a backpack!

It was very exciting today when I set out on our hike and Google Maps led us out the Mass Pike. Every other trip has started out Route 2. We must be making some progress in our circuit around the Bay.

My first thought on parking the car by the exit of the Sudbury Reservoir trail was “this is going to suck.” I could peer through trees to a forbidden sylvan trail, and behind me was my destination: suburbia, office park-ia, and Route 30. However, not too far down the road my journey turned into a mystery tour. The trail description told me to look for a trail in the back of an asphalt lot beside an “abandoned store”. The store is no longer abandoned - it’s a plumbing shop. But the lot is there, with some vehicles and derelict sheds, and a defunct water heater, and… there beside a small gap in the Japanese knotweed was a trail. A blaze on a post of the shed confirmed. After a little sketchy near-bushwhacking, we were on an abandoned road, the paving barely visible down the middle. It brought us to a road behind Sanofi HQ, and then we were back on the road, crossing Route 9 on a vehicle overpass into Corporate World. It belatedly occurred to me that Memorial Day was a perfect day to do this trip since on a normal weekday, even in a pandemic, there would be much more traffic on these pedestrian-hostile roads. We then slipped behind a big office building onto the Staples Fitness Trail. I was picturing one of those Parcourse things with rugged fitness obstacles, but no, it was a lovely woodland trail that went for nearly a mile including the extension. It’s quite woodsy, meaning no Staples employees in girl shoes are getting on that trail in one piece, but great for us and not one soul to be seen. I could smell honeysuckle on the air in the shade by the brook, but the soundscape was dominated first by the Staples HVAC and then by the Mass Pike, which was so loud it made me nervous and I put Sulu on lead. He was off lead the whole way back because I had a sense of the distances by then. We popped up on in Ashland on the Southboro line. Our next move will be to cross the Mass Pike (overpass) and find the Ashland Town Forest.