Exploring the new woods

 In preparation for a horse I started to look around for places to walk and ride next to and near our property. Low and behold, from the town's tax maps I found a 10 acre lot right next to us that is landlocked (no road access) and has no house. I did track down, using google, in a rather roundabout way, that it belongs to the people on the other side. So one afternoon I put on my "courageous shoes", grabbed the kid for dimple equity and visited the nice lady to ask for permission. Which was no problem at all, she had't been or seen that part of her property in more than 20 years and her only request was that she could come and see it some day herself... Well, of course!

Unfortunately it's not really suited for horses, even ponies, as it really is a wetland (it's part of a New York State Protected Wetlands Area) and parts of it are too muddy. The dogs and the goat do fine, but eight hundred pounds on four little hooves were apparently too much - he sank to his knees, just about! My heart sank too, I envisioned having to get a crane in to suck him back out...

 

Especially in Spring Simon and I hiked the "Buurman Pad" almost weekly. Lately the weeds have been a little too much for Simon, they grew just about as tall as he is and now he wants his dad to mow it first. With the dry spring parts of it are pretty dried up tho and much easier to hike, when it is wet there are one or two area's with creek like tendencies - I might need to put some bits of boardwalk down here as well.

In de pic above Simon is checking out a hollow tree - a gnome house - while carrying his butterfly catching net and house. We did not catch anything that day but did enjoy all the yellow marsh flowers.

This is the beginning behind the shed - the easy part thru pretty dry woods with not too dense shrubbery. I did misread the tax map, turns out they do not show structures accurately (it's computer generated) and started the hike on our other neighbors land (our property is long and skinny so we have two neighbors on each side) but he did not mind and uses it to walk his dogs whenever he petsits our goats. It took about two weeks of daily afternoon exercise to make a path that takes maybe 15 minutes to walk...