Sally, where do you go off road? Are you talking about the Starmet site near the Thoreau Club? I hardly ride my mtb, but I am always looking for new trails.
One of the things I noticed on my old commute was a building with a GIANT clock on it. It's in the front of a shopping center on a main road (RT 2A) on the corner of Pope Rd. I have driven by here zillions of times, but i had never noticed it in 17 years! I would always pass the clock between 5:58 and 6:02, which gave me a sense of being on schedule.
A big part of my commute was on a road I love to ride on. When I first started riding, I would go out and back on this road, for a total of about 6-7 miles. It is one of the few fairly flat roads around here. It was a lot closer to my old house, so I loved being able to ride it on my commute. There are a few little rollers going toward work and at 6:15 in the morning, it was amazing how slow I would be going, compared to when I was just riding for training. It's heavily wooded on both sides, with a good bike lane, but there are a lot of cars at certain times of the day.I noticed a lot about the houses on this street. On the way home, I would fly on this road because it's on a slight downhill that way. At the end of this road is a park, where I would stop, take a long drink and rest, to prepare for the next part of the trip, which had some tricky traffic sections.