Dispatches Photo Contest

Here are some of our favorite photos from recent day trips. If it doesn't have a caption, identify the photo location in a comment and win a free PDF of the Day Tripper! Click the speech bubble for captions, and click on the photo to see a larger version on Picasa.

Cross-Country Skiing for Kids

Get your kids involved with a fun, healthy, inexpensive, safe and relatively cheap lifetime winter sport! There is an excellent cross-country instructional league based at the Weston Ski Track, called the Bill Koch League. They encourage parents to get in on the act, too! They welcome all abilities and will teach kids 7+ how to ski and even do a bit of fun racing. There are over 80 kids in the local program. The season has a wonderful grand finale ski festival in Gunstock, NH. In December, practices will start again at our usual home-base at the Weston Ski Track on Saturdays at 9:30. In years past, our first on-snow practice is generally in mid-Dec., due to excellent snow-making equipment at Weston. For more details, email Lauren Hefferon of the Arlington Outings Club.

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See the Compleat Day Tripper for Weston and other family-tested cross-country ski destinations!

Going to Walden

by Mary Oliver

It isn’t very far as highways lie.
I might be back by nightfall, having seen
The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water.
Friends argue that I might be wiser for it.
They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper:
How dull we grow from hurrying here and there!

Many have gone, and think me half a fool
To miss a day away in the cool country.
Maybe. But in a book I read and cherish,
Going to Walden is not so easy a thing
As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult
Trick of living, and finding it where you are.

From The River Styx, Ohio and Other Poems, published in "New and Selected Poems," 1992. Found in the Busa Farm newsletter, November 2007