Road Trips and Hike Reports

We headed out of Lexington pretty early in the day with a pick-up order from Panera Bread.  The trip started on US-68 and then went across a giant swath of Ohio on OH-32/OH-124 then OH-7/11 all the way up to I-90 which we were on for just 30 miles or so to get into Erie.  Some of the minor roads in the Appalachian part of OH were amazingly fun and twisty. We also saw but sadly didn't photograph a frighteningly swollen raging part of a river we crossed.  The entirety of the drive was very quiet with the only section that had anything resembling a modest amount of traffic was OH-11 around Youngstown area.  It was about 4 PM and there were relatively  a lot of people headed North for a few miles in that stretch.  The hotel in Erie (Best Western) has a nice modern design.  We had Chick-Fil-A (their Drive Thru was banging out many orders and a long but impressively fast line of cars) in bed and watched some more British Baking Challenge before falling asleep. I was very pleased to f

Today was a very pleasant day. The weather improved from 'almost raining' all day to quite sunny and as the day went on, pleasingly warm.  We drove I-24, I-69 (formerly Western KY Parkway) and a good chunk of the Western KY Parkway that is NOT now part of I-69 before the hike and then KY-84 and US-68 (both very scenic) most of the rest of the way to Lexington. The hike started off very wet and muddy for maybe .75 of the first 1.5 miles.  After that it got less mucky and more enjoyable as it worked its way down to a river and a single hike-in camp site at the end of the White Oaks trail.  Surprisingly for the location and conditions, we saw two separate other hikers on this trail.  We were wondering why the person who plotted this trail on Alltrails only went ~2.6 miles each way etc but when we got to the campsite and the trail went no further, it made sense. Tonight's hotel takes advantage of Covid-19 savings by putting us in a Hyatt Regency in Lexington for about

The day started out leaving our cabin fairly early in the morning.  We took Arkansas 7 North for a few curvy and foggy hours and then US-65 up through Branson Missouri.  My old friend US-60 led us East for hours all the way to Paducah with only brief diversions on other roads.  It was all very peaceful but also seemingly endless.  In a way it isn't surprising as this was the first day of the 'lets get home' portion of the trip so it was a lot of miles to cover. For a leg stretcher I used Alltrails and found a hike in the Mark Twain National Forest that was pretty close to our US-60 through route.  What I didn't look at in detail (and would have been challenging to determine quickly) was that this trail started about 6 miles off of a paved road.  So while not a very long in miles journey, it was a little more rugged to get to it than we were hoping for as a quick mid-trip walk.  It was also a little remote with marginal cell service and warnings about bear activity. 

After checking into our duplex cabin last night, I had a relaxing bath in the surprisingly accommodating bath tub in our room.  We went to bed early. Brian was really feeling weary after so many miles of hiking in the past week plus fighting off a sinus infection,  When we started on our long hike this morning I could feel my muscles aching so taking yesterday off from hiking (mostly because of the weather) was probably a good thing. The plan was to do the 12 mile boy scout trail here at Petit Jean .  That trail connects 4 or 5 of the individual feature trails here at the park. Sometimes covering just a portion of the feature trail, sometimes incorporating most of it.  As it turned out, we headed out from the cabin, to the lodge (which is also the portal to some of the trails) and made it through Bear Cave trail, a piece of connecting trail, part of the premiere trail here called Seven Hollows Trail, then a lone (2+ mile?) connecting trail to Blue Hole area.  When we got to Blue Hole

We got out of Memphis pretty early.  We headed down US-61 through Tunica and over into Arkansas at West Helena.  I had hoped to hike Arkansas Post National Monument . I actually knew almost nothing about that park but I had for some reason, years ago, printed out the trail guide from the dearly departed website trails.com and when I looked through the big basket of hike guides I saw that one there and it was reasonably to swing through on a non-Interstate route between Memphis and our 2 night cabin at Petit Jean. When we got to Petit Jean it was cool and rainy.  The visitors center said no more than 10 visitors allowed at once but since we were the only car in the entire lot I was pretty sure we'd be ok.  As with most of the places we've talked to people (the TN state parks both had visitor's centers), they seem really pleased to have some face to face interaction during this nearly post apocalyptic level of isolation we are going through.  We watched a reasonably well pr

Brian, Rob and I headed out for a nice afternoon walk after a morning spent doing travel chores (washing laundry etc).  I originally had found a 3.5 mile loop at this park but when we got there we figured out (after driving all through the impressively long park road system) that this particular trail was closed.  Luckily, Rob had been to this park many times so we parked at a different trailhead and started walking.  We ended up with a good long walk mostly along the blue and white co-blazed trails and then we came back on one of the parks paved trails.  The park had a lot more ups and downs than I expected for being so close to Memphis. After the hike we had dinner at Rob's house and an early end to the evening to prepare for an early start on the way to Arkansas the next day.

We headed out of Nashville around 9 am along US-70 towards Memphis.  After checking in at Johnsonville Historic Park and finding out that a tornado had reduced their hikeable mileage down to just 2.5 miles we proceeded on to Nathan Bedford Forrest park .  This park also had a lot less of a trail network than it did before the tornado.  So we did the 3 mile loop that was open.  That loop was a hike I'd done (as part of the 5 mile loop I think) back when I lived in TN around 2004.  The Pilot Knob trail was lovely and had some good ups and downs. The cabin was so cute and had an amazing view down to the Tennessee River.  We didn't stay there or anything but it sure looked inviting. As we continued West we were hoping to find another hike of similar length because the 3 mile hike was high on quality but low on quantity. The weather was getting worse but it looked like it would be ok at Fort Pillow State Park which was a place I liked walking in the past.  Unfortunately

I contemplated a number of different hike possibilities as we drove west from Pigeon Forge over to Nashville.  That East/West trip takes you from the Smoky mountains, over and around the Cumberland Plateau and past many great state parks.  Initially I thought we might end up at Fall Creek Falls state park but then I tripped upon a hike I hadn't done since 2005.  There are a series of 5 or 6 parcels of land in TN called the Pocket Wildernesses.  They were plots of land owned by the Bowater corporation that were donated to the state in the 1970's.  The area we hiked in yesterday is supposedly only 700 acres but it feels amazingly remote (nasty dirt road to access, no cell service etc) yet it's all of about 3 miles from the thriving industrial city of Dayton TN, home of a very large set of La-Z-Boy manufacturing and distribution facilities.  Just like last time I was there so many years ago I went a little nuts on the pictures but I'm managing to 'only' post a hand

We left Charlotte early on Monday morning and took US-74 and various other roads to get from Charlotte to Robbinsville NC where the Skyway starts.  The Skyway was beautiful and remote with virtually nobody on it.  Parts of it were quite foggy.  We did walk about 1.5 miles at one of the trailheads to look at a bald.  Balds are spots on this otherwise tree covered mountain range that for unclear reasons, have seemingly never had much vegetation on them.  This particular bald was quite long and narrow and looked itself like it could have been a trail as it sloped off the edge of the mountain like walking down a grass covered bowling ball. Pigeon Forge was fun and relatively less obviously impacted by Coronavirus.  The number of people who were around was very very slim especially at hotels and attractions but most things were open and available.  The weather was quite rainy Tuesday so we opted not to do an actual trail hike but we did walk a hefty 10 miles in town alon