There were signs early Monday morning that the weather was going to be extraordinary, but I had no idea until I got out into it how glorious it would turn out to be. Sunny, calm, so pleasantly warm it could have been any day in the middle of summer. I just loafed along the trail all afternoon, taking in the sights and sounds, barely exerting myself at all except to climb an occasional hillside, and yet I had to strip down to a t-shirt! Just glorious!

I thought about going down the road to the arboretum, which is a lovely park and can be very relaxing when I need a quick nature fix, but today I wanted to spend hours outdoors in peace and quiet and, unfortunately, the arboretum is almost always saturated in noise from the surrounding streets: racing engines, heavy trucks slapping their wheels against the highway pavement, sirens blaring, helicopters landing at the hospital less than half a mile away, jet fighters blasting off from the airport.

Lucky for me, the Swamplover’s Preserve is just a thirty-minute drive from where I live, close enough to the city to make it easy to get to, far enough away that I can wander around in it all day and rarely, if ever, hear the blatt of a truck engine or rush of a jet plane. I’ve been there half a dozen times now and I think I enjoy hiking there as much, maybe even more than in the arboretum

(A high-winged Cessna was spiraling down to practice landings somewhere to the north of the preserve for the better part of an hour. His droning engine was the only noise that intruded on my afternoon walk. I’ve searched and searched that area using Google Earth, and I see lots of long flat fields but I can’t find a wind sock near any of them. The way he was circling around reminded me of practicing engine-out landings over the farm fields around Clintonville.)

I parked in the lot at the southern end of the preserve to walk north up the main trail before looping back on the alternate trail. The climb from the parking lot to the top of the bluff is pretty rugged but brief, and there’s a bench halfway up where you can stop and rest if needed, but once you’re at the top, the next ten or fifteen minutes is a fairly easy stroll, almost level, keeping close to the contour lines of the hill.

There was barely a breath of wind through the trees as I walked the trail along the hillside, and the sun was bright enough that I stopped to peel off my sun shirt and stuff it into my pack before I’d gone a mile. I walked the rest of the hike, 4.5 miles in total, in a t-shirt. In early March! We are probably through the very worst of the winter weather — no more subzero temps or snow drifts up to our butts– but we’re going to have a few more weeks where it gets below freezing and there will definitely be at least two more heavy snows before we are all the way out of it. Yet there I was, sauntering through the sunshine, warm all the way through to my bones, same as I would be on any day in July. So relaxing!

When I drove out to Table Bluff, I was thinking I would do the usual out-and-back as quickly as I could comfortably walk it, but when I got out of my car in the parking lot, I immediately appreciated how good the sun felt on my shoulders and quickly decided that this was not going to be a quick out-and-back. I started up the hill at a leisurely stroll and never went any faster than that, stopping frequently to take in the view, check out the birds, listen to the rustle of the leaves, or have a rest on a trailside bench. I ended up walking the trail for close to three hours. Best afternoon I’ve had in a while.

I called my mom in the evening to chat, mostly to tell her what a great day it was and how I spent most of the day strolling through the woods. “Isn’t it great being retired?” she asked. It was a mostly rhetorical question but I had to answer it anyway: “Yes, it really is.”