When I was a little girl, trails in Durham were significant to my mother and me. My Mother designed a book about Wildflowers in North Carolina, and she experimented with cooking day-lilly buds and even dared to eat some fungus off a log in Duke Forest. (I don't recommend you do that unless you know what you're doing.)

I remember hiking all through Duke Forest, around the New Hope Creek and Hollow Rock area, and up on Mt. Sinai Road. Nowadays if you're lucky, you can join up with a Trading Path hike led by Tom Magnuson, and he will point out ancient paths and roads in the woods that multicultural people used for trade back in pre-colonial and colonial days in North Carolina (and Virginia). What were they likely trading? Likely they were trading pearls and copper as well as furs and whatever else people liked to get.

From a point high on Mt. Sinai Tom will point out an area in the distance that he thinks might have been the ancient village of Andushuseer. (Of course, a lot of people say Andushuseer is near where they live. I am not exactly sure where it was. No one is exactly sure.)

Anyway, Tom Magnuson and the tradingpath.org and associated blog: http://www.tradingpath.org/blog/ are very important and you should know about this if you live in North Carolina, and especially if you think trade started with trains.

Check it out.

Oh, and a one other cool bit of gossip I just heard about Granville Circle, in Durham. That's where Pete and Carol used to live, and it came to pass that my brother lived there, beside a lake, in 1972. I used to take him out paddling on the lake. Anyhow, the gossip I just heard was that Richard Nixon had lived there when he was going to Duke!