Welcome back to National Parks & other public lands with T! If you are seeing this on Twitter or Facebook, please visit the blog to see all of the photos and read the story by clicking the link.

We adopted a new puppy earlier this summer. The rescue group advised us to socialize her with as many dogs and people as possible. So when I noticed Take A Hike! NJ had scheduled a dog friendly hike at Ramapo Reservation, I decided to take Trudy and Lily.

The group followed the yellow trail to the waterfall and then continued up to MacMillan Reservoir. Some of the Labradors and golden retrievers in the group enjoyed splashing around in the water.

We’d taken this route a few weeks earlier with Trudy, Lily and a friend’s dog. The MacMillan Reservoir was originally created to supply the nearby Crocker Mansion, built in 1907. Now, people…

Welcome back to National Parks & other public lands with T! If you are seeing this on Twitter or Facebook, please visit the blog to see all of the photos and read the story by clicking the link.

After visiting Iao Valley, our Best of Maui excursion headed over to the Maui Tropical Plantation. This plantation is  on the site of a former sugar cane plantation. Sugar cane, once dominant in Hawaii, is no longer produced there as it can be harvested less expensively in other countries.

Plantation Mike, who grew up in one of the sugar company’s houses, met our group and talked to us about what it was like to live there back in the day. Working the sugar cane crop for a living was a difficult life.

Maui Tropical Plantation has incorporated some of the old mill-works into the landscaping.

Today the plantation produces a variety of…