With the unseasonably warm weather this weekend in New Hampshire and the rest of New England, how could you not want to get outdoors? On Saturday, four of us planned a there-and-back trip on the Windham and Derry Rail Trails.
We started at a crowded Canobie Lake depot parking area for the Windham RT on Route 28, at the Windham and Salem, NH border, and headed north on the scenic, very leafy trail into Windham.
The warm air, scenery (woods, wetlands, and ponds), and conversation received our attention, but we needed to keep one eye on the trail along some parts, because the leaves obscured the pavement edge. There were also (understandably) tons of other trail users enjoying the late-spring-like temperatures, cycling, running, skating, and walking.
We got lunch at The Grind Rail Trail Cafe in Derry before the return trip. It was cool to see their “pay it forward” note rack (below).
After our group got back to the parking area, I continued south on the Salem Bike-Ped Corridor (the name for the same trail as it goes through Salem) to check if there was any progress south of Main St.
The two planned segments south of Main St. (Phases 4 and 5, as seen in this story map) are to be developer-built as part of the Tuscan Village development. I’m not sure what the latest is with that development, but I think an early phase has been built but future phases are still in the works. Anyway, the bike-ped corridor still ends here.
Hopefully in the not-too-distant future, we’ll see a continuous connection between the MA-NH border (and further south into MA via the Methuen Rail Trail), up to Manchester, completing the southernmost leg of the Granite State Rail Trail.
Jeff Brubaker 