Bay Circuit Diary

Welcome to Susan's Bay Circuit Diary! This blog follows my adventures with my dog Sulu hiking the Bay Circuit Trail .  To get new posts in your inbox, please 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 . One of the charms of the BCT is its ubiquity.  If you enter or leave the Boston area by any route, you are crossing the BCT.  Sulu and I were attending a class in New Hampshire and the promised rain held off, so we made a stop in Andover to hike a new part of trail.   OK, not an AVIS reservation, but abutting one We parked at one AVIS reservation and walked to another, Deer Jump Reservation .   Park here for the trail - the above was BCT busywork Unfortunately I forgot the bug spray.  I was motivated to let Sulu off leash so I’d have two hands to wave away the bugs. I knew I’d be walking along the Merrimack Rive...

Welcome to Susan's Bay Circuit Diary! This blog follows my adventures with my dog Sulu hiking the Bay Circuit Trail .  To get new posts in your inbox, please 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 . We have a break in the hot weather, ushered in by thunderstorms. There are still rainstorms roving around, but unexpectedly there was a clear patch of weather, especially in the Sherborn area.  So I jumped in the car with Sulu and headed for the trail.  Once arriving at the designated parking location, I spent about five minutes in the car figuring out where the trail started, using Google Maps, AllTrails, the BCT written description and map, and the compass app on my phone.  It was time well spent and saved me time flailing around the elementary school campus where I parked.  The breakthrough was finding the service road, ...

Welcome to Susan's Bay Circuit Diary! This blog follows my adventures with my dog Sulu hiking the Bay Circuit Trail .  To get new posts in your inbox, please 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 . Section of Map 1 One of the fun things about the BCT is because it is so long and covers so much area, it experiences different microclimates along the way.   The heat wave took a day off today but the effects were variable: it was a marine influence, strongest closest to the coast.   It was unexpected, so I didn’t plan a morning departure.   Instead I headed for the very beginning of the BCT on Plum Island , a barrier island in Newburyport, where the temperatures were in the 60s.   I wanted to involve Walter, so I proposed a two mode trip: we would park at the Joppa Flats Audubon place, bikejor with Sulu to the beginning of ...

Welcome to Susan's Bay Circuit Diary! This blog follows my adventures with my dog Sulu hiking the Bay Circuit Trail .  To get new posts in your inbox, please 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 . This post is about the orange squiggle on the upper right We are well into a heat wave that’s expected to last two weeks, with dog-hostile temperatures starting fairly early in the day.  Fortunately or otherwise, Benny, my other, older dog, has taken the pandemic as an opportunity to house train me. Every morning between 4:30 and 7:30 AM, he gets up, shakes himself jingling his tags, and goes to the bedroom door. Three months into the pandemic, we have established that he won’t take no for an answer.  So I get up and take him (and usually Sulu) outside in my PJs.  Then I go back to bed.  In the early weeks of the lockdown, I wa...