Another sunny day to start, if not a little cold. Hike began through nice stands of tall pines that produced a tiger-striped pattern on ground with the strong sunlight shining between them. Came upon a GREAT camping area with same lean-tos we saw before with inward facing fireplaces, but now right on a lake! Further down ‘the road’ was a boat launch with a log cabin lodge that would be super for large group celebrations. We eventually came out on the paved Maple Highlands trail that went through what seemed like a golf course. Eventually became more private land surrounding trail, with Amish farms adjacent to trail, and we were all VERY surprised when we saw an Amish buggy coming towards us! As it turned out, we were passed several times on this paved trail by buggies going north, so it seemed we were on an off-road buggy super-highway of sorts! Quite exciting- we never tired of seeing them go by! We even passed over another, more ornate, covered bridge. Somehow in our fascination with the Amish we missed our BT turnoff and walked much further along the trail than we should have, ending up at a war memorial that documented the heavy losses suffered by only a few families in this tiny town of Burton Station from WWI until the Afghan war- so sad. Seemed like such a heavy loss burdened by so few families. We re-navigated (thank you GPS!) and finally joined up with BT again further on down the road. Along the way we passed many Amish farms and buggies. We finally came into Burton, where we got lunch at Coffee Corners Antiques, a comfortable little shop with good sandwiches and hot cocoa. Being restored, we visited the log cabin maple syrup shop in the town green, then the century village, and eventually went off the sidewalks into the woods just out of town. Out of no where we came upon a cemetery with many gravestones from the early 1800s-some with beautiful engravings. The BT dived off into a wet lowland wood, which came out onto a field, where we skirted along the outer edge as part of the ‘trail’. We were excited to see a fox up ahead jump off into the surrounding woods, and even more excited when April thought she saw a sleeping fox right off into the woods. Turned out the fox was dead and was among many dead animals in some sort of eery open grave yard of mixed animals, some in plastic bags. Strange way to end a great hike that the all felt was one of the most entertaining we had ever taken!
