Walking in Spartanburg

Tuesday:

I was "back to work" this morning. I'm filling in at my previous job while the lady who took my place is out on maternity leave. Maya Drinkall, my replacement, had a baby boy last Friday. Maya and her son are both doing well and should be home from the hospital by now. So today I started doing accounting work for the medical practice which I will continue to do for the next six weeks. Luckily I have not been gone too long, so for the most part I was able to pick up where I left off when I retired on January 31st. However when you have not done something for several months you have to stop and think about each step where it used to come to me without much thought.

Connie and I decided to do some walking around Spartanburg today. There are a number of urban trails located within the city limits and we chose to walk on the Mary Black Rails to Trails route. It is a two mile trail that was previously a rail line. The old railroad line has been removed and replaced with a paved path. Connie walked for 3 miles and I went ahead and finished the 4 miles trek of going to end of each way of the trail. Connie was able to do the 3 miles in a good pace with no back pain. YAHOO!!

Spartanburg is know as the Hub City since in the 19th Century
a number of railroads came through the city

View down the Rails to Trails path

After we finished our walk and had a beverage to replace our fluids (temps were in the low 80's), we looked for a place to eat lunch. There were a number of small restaurants, sandwich shops and bistros located in the downtown area so we decided to park and walk around till we found one to try. We ended up a the Cafe Around the Corner. It is more of a sandwich shop than a restaurant and they have not been open very long. It is a farm to table place that only serves natural and organic items. Connie had a "veggie burger" while I had one of the lunch special sandwiches with cold cucumber soup and potato chips. Both of our meals were very good, but I thought mine tasted better. We gave them a good review on Yelp and then walked back to the Jeep.

Cafe Around the Corner in downtown Spartanburg. We gave it a great
review on Yelp.

We then went to visit the Hatcher Garden and Woodland Preserve. The Hatchers were a couple that retired to Spartanburg in 1969 and spent the next 30 years improving the 10 acre gully behind their house into a beautiful garden/preserve.  It is a place of quiet and tranquility near the downtown area in Spartanburg. When we were there today we had the place to ourselves (except for a couple of workers).

Entry into Hatcher Garden/Woodland Preserve

Connie hiding among the flowers

There were several pieces of art in the garden

The pond at the bottom of the garden

One of three small waterfalls in the garden

Some of the trees are over 100 feet tall

Information about the Hatchers and the garden

After this we drove by The Seay House, the oldest house in Spartanburg. We found the house to be behind a high fence and only open by appointment. We took a quick look at the house and then moved on.

The Seay House - oldest house in Spartanburg
I took this pictures between the wires in the fence

It was a good day for us. Connie was able to walk without pain and we both glad to be active instead of traveling or sitting for hours each day. We came back to The Duchess were I went back to work again for a couple of hours before we had dinner. Spartanburg in an interesting small city with several colleges. There seems to be an active downtown area with some new construction along with renovations of some older buildings occurring at the current time. There is also a section of the city along the I-26 highway with all of the modern box stores and chain restaurants.