Road Trips and Hike Reports

This was a nice little hike that we haven't done before.  We bumped into a few people on the trail who were all part of a group of 6 people doing a hike together.  They didn't know where the others in their group were at relative to each other so it was fun telling them there was just 1 person in front of them or that they were the last group etc.    

Clearly this wasn't an expedition.  It was a brief stop on the way to dinner but it was a nice way to enjoy the longer days of spring.   Brian found a ring on the ground which I took back to the park the next day.

This was a new park for us.  I don't think I'd ever looked into it before.  A gulf, in this part of the country, is a deep gorge with a creek in it.  This Erie county park is over 500 acres and, as the county's park webpage clearly states, not developed.  There are 11 named and marked trails in the park but no bathrooms, garbage service and with the exception of 1 bridge, seemingly almost no trail structures to make creek crossings easier.  The markings were interesting.  All the trails we used were color marked matching the map from the website.  Some of the trails that were only a mile or two had dozens of fence stakes with color matching, sequentially numbered little markers on them.  Still, we had to do a lot of visual scanning to follow the route because it has been very wet and in this early part of the season there weren't super obvious tracks in some areas. We haven't been hiking that much lately so this was a good spring, get back into i...

Monday was going to be a long day.  We had to leave our hotel around 10 (both because that is checkout time and because we had an architecture tour that started at noon) and from then until our 9:30 pm train, we had to find something to do and someplace to do it. We left all our bags except 1 backback at the hotel.  The hotel overall was a little disappointing.  The air conditioning (and even the fan) wouldn't come on and the wi-fi was randomly very slow at times.  We also could hear almost everything going on outside and in the interior hallways because despite being a historic building, it just isn't set up to block sounds very well.  Thankfully, some parts of the hotel were great.  The tub in our room was perfect for soaking, quite deep and well shaped.  The jacuzzi part worked well but like most of those things, it was kind of noisy and I valued watching a TV show on my laptop more than the bubbles. We arrived at the dock for the architecture tour ...

Our flight from Seattle got in on time at the very end of Wednesday night, almost Thursday midnight.  We got our luggage quickly after a very long walk through O’Hare airport.  Then we had to navigate getting to the rental car center.  Normally that’s an airport transportation system ride from any terminal out to the rental car center but that was being maintained when we arrived.  So, after finding the correct door to wait outside, we waited in a chaotic line for 2 different buses that were substituting while the train was down.  It was misty and cold and not very well organized so it felt like forever.  Then the bus took us on a long meandering trip through the many access roads around the airport and eventually let us off at the rental car center.  There was nobody on the ground floor at the Enterprise counter so we went up to the 3rd level where the ‘other’ Enterprise desk was.  Thankfully we ended up being first served out of the clump of peo...

My step-mother started struggling with Alzheimer's disease a few years ago.  For a while it was gradual and manageable but at the end of 2025 it had progressed to a pretty debilitating state.  When my father told me in January about the latest developments, it seemed clear her time was nearing an end.  We booked a trip to visit as soon as was practical for us since we couldn't know with ANY precision how much longer she would live but also that, ultimately, if our visit landed before she passed we'd get to say goodbye and if it landed after her passing we could probably help my dad with the immense task of getting the house in order after being focused on the many aspects of caring for my step-mother for so long. We already had a train trip planned to go to Chicago and Madison (WI) in March so we mushed the 2 trips together. As it turned out our visit was too late to visit Judee who passed quietly at home on February 12th, 2026.  There wasn't any formal funeral servi...