Playing Hooky

 

Batona Trail, Brendan Byrne State Forest

17 February 2024

My day job doesn't pay a whole lot, but I have excellent benefits, one of which is the accumulation of two vacation days each month. There's an upper limit to how many of those I can hang onto. I'm about to hit that limit. 

I worked on MLK day, an employee holiday, so even though I took three days off this week, I only ate into two of my vacation days. Playing hooky also had the benefit of getting me out of having to be bored to tears at a colleague's baby shower. I've been to three of those dreadful things in my life, one of which was when I was 8 years old, so I'm not even sure that counts. As a non-breeder with a deletion of the mommy gene, I don't go all squishy at the sight of a pair of knitted baby booties. I tossed $20 towards some sort of spawn sack and ducked out of the lab days before the event.

The real reason I took Wednesday off was to join Our Jeff on one of his AMC Wednesday hikes. Usually they're local, but this time he chose a 7-mile walk down in the Pinelands. 

I volunteered to drive him and another hiker to the start at the Brendan Byrne State Forest office. Back in the day, when it was still Lebanon State Forest, we called this place the Ranger's Station. It's impossible for me not to associate this area with my grad school field work, the last of which I finished 29 years ago. I was 29 at the time. In other words, that was half a lifetime ago. Still, that's where my head is whenever I pass through the forest. 

We're usually on our bikes, a third of the way through Tom's Pinelands Cruise, when we stop for water at the park office. I always take a picture of the wooden shed.

I like the door.

Up north, we'd had a snowstorm the night before. Down here there wasn't a trace of it. There were twenty-something-odd of us gathered in a big circle in the parking lot. Tom, JackH, and Dorothy were there. Along with Our Jeff, they were the only people I knew. I think Tom and I were the only ones not yet retired. He has Wednesdays off, though. 

This is one thing retired folks do. They hike on Wednesday mornings. I could get into that.

We started off on the Cranberry Trail. It was all in the woods. There were pitch pine needles and oak leaves at our feet. Once upon a time I was able to identify all the trees with their scientific names. I was never as good at the understory. All those ericacious shrubs look the same to me in the winter. 

Once in a while we'd cross a stream.

This one happened to run alongside a road. Every time I stopped for pictures I fell off the back of the group.

Eventually we reached Pakim Pond. The trail goes around it, and we got to see some of the wetlands that border it.

I took pictures of the same spots from different angles. I like them all, so I'm posting them all.

When we got back to the pavilion, we took a snack break. I stood by the edge of the water to get pictures. A flock of oak leaves made their way from the bank to the center of the pond.

Jack H leaned against a tree and ate an apple.

To get back to the start, we took the Batona Trail. It's mostly flat, except toward the end, where there are little inclines, once-upon-a-time sand dunes. I tried to show it with my camera, but of course it didn't work.

There was another little hill up ahead. I stepped off the trail to try ot show it.

It worked better when I got in line.

We crossed a dirt road at one point.

I caught up to Jack H there. "He's supposed to put the hills at the beginning," I said, because a good ride leader puts the tough stuff in the first half.

After the hike, a few of us went to the Vincentown Diner. South Jersey diners are dying by degrees. 29 years ago, the running joke among us was that the natural habitat for a diner was a traffic circle. As the circles got reworked, the diners disappeared. I remember when Olga's died. That was a mega-diner on a mega-circle. The circle became a lighted intersection. Olga's went out of business. The one in Maple Shade, where we used to go after our night class, is gone now too. Mastori's, another behemoth, went away a year or so ago. The diner two miles from home disappeared during the pandemic; it's a pancake house now. The latest demise in the Pinelands is the Red Lion diner, which I went to once in grad school. It was on a circle. The Vincentown Diner is at a 4-way intersection. Long may it live.

My legs were tired. I'm not used to hiking, even though I spend a lot of time on my feet during the day, and for hours on end in the glassblowing classroom. It's not the same as a steady trudge in clunky hiking boots. This walk was flat. I wonder how long I'd last on a hilly hike.

I did't take it easy on Thursday. Instead, I did one of my weightlifting sessions followed by a ride on the trainer. I'm trying to do multiple days in a row in preparation for Nova Scotia; Pete G was going to lead us on a short bike ride the next day.

Thursday was cold and very windy. I entertained the notion of riding up to the start, but 7 miles dead into 30 mph gusts with a wind chill in the 20s put that idea to rest. I drove up instead, and I'm glad I did. I had all of my warmest gear on, including heavy leggings that are a little snug at the knees, making it that much harder to move. 

Pete is the master of what Plain Jim calls "the real estate tour." He wove me and Rickety in and out of farmlands and neighborhoods without ever getting very far from Pennington. Whenever we were into the wind, which he did a good job of keeping us out of, it felt as if we were climbing a steep hill. 

Halfway, we took a brief break at Twin Pines, where a sign at the artificial turf field warns people not to do some very specific things, like eat sunflower seeds or drink colored soda.

Our average at the end was lower than on one of my usual hilly rides. The route was easy but the ride was tough.

After the ride, we spent some time inside Terra Momo, where Pete, assuming correctly that I wanted one, ordered a cortado for me before I had the chance. 

So that was three days as a retired person. Somehow I managed to fill the time. I can't yet see how I'd pull this off every day for the rest of my life. That's why I'm going back to work on Monday. I need a few more years to figure this out.