Sunday September 26th , Como Lake park, Lancaster New York (near Buffalo), About 2.5 miles, minimal elevation gain

Brian had to work Saturday so we crammed a lot into Sunday.  We started with breakfast at home then headed out to film a candy review video with a friend and Target coworker of his at the friend's Antique Store.  It was a fun morning and though the store was so busy when we arrived I didn't think we'd be able to get a video done, it quieted down eventually and the entire video went in one quick take.

After the video filming we headed towards Buffalo.  I had tickets reserved on a Teddy Roosevelt Inauguration site (run by the National Park Service) for the last tour of the day (3:30-4:30 pm).  I was hopeful for a moderate but challenging hike on the way but the hike I initially chose from the 50 Trails in Western NY book was a lot farther away than I imagined.  Alltrails helped me find this Como Lake park which wasn't too far away from Buffalo.  Erie county (which Buffalo is in) has an absolutely amazing park system with numerous lovely parks, some of the quite large. Plus a county forest system which we visited the first winter we were in NY.  This park was very quiet especially considering the gorgeous fall weather.  There are a number of little loop trails that interlock and seem to provide almost endless possibilities to get the length of walk you want.  The photos are ok but they really fail to capture what a perfect fall break this park was.  We didn't want to get to Buffalo too early so after Lake Como I looked on car GPS and then Google Maps and noticed a long narrow park nearby set along a creek in Depew/Cheektowaga which looks like a really desirable middle class suburb.  The walk along the creek was not too fascinating but it helped get the mileage up a bit and I like seeing neighborhoods and houses etc.  It was very quiet there and we sat for just a few minutes on one of the many lovely benches with potted plants around etc.  For a small park that barely even has a sign announcing its presence, it was really nice.


Pics are all from Lake Como.








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sunday February 4th 2024 - Oak Rim/Power Pole/Explorer trails - Tug Hill state forest area near Rodman NY - 3 miles, just 223 feet elevation gain

Image
Link to our hike plot on Alltrails . Yesterday's hike was from ' 50 Hikes in Western NY ', the origin for this hike was the similar and often similarly challenging to follow ' 50 Hikes in Central NY ' book.  The book wrote up a whole series of different trails in the Tug Hill region as though it was a 2 day backpacking trip.  It is certainly possible to dissect those 2 day plans and work out the individual components but he absolutely doesn't make it easy since he doesn't really call out the breaks between the different trails.  Thankfully, Alltrails had a number of them plotted individually which is more useful for a day trip.  I thought Tug Hill was relatively close to home so I was kind of surprised when it came up at over a 2 hour long drive but we had time so we stuck with it.  The Tug hill region is pretty interesting.  It's a HUGE area (bigger than our 2 smallest US states) and very rural and known for heavy snowfall. Since this hike was  almos
Read more

July 27, 2024 - Canadian Cruise Vacation Day 8 - Bar Harbor, Maine

Image
Bar Harbor was a gorgeous place to drop anchor.  And since it was the only port that was too small for us to directly dock at, we literally did drop anchor there. Unfortunately, the health issues continue to plague our group and I was the only one well enough to go on shore.  I enjoyed the shuttle trips both ways.  It’s really weird to walk from a very large boat to a relatively small one while neither is anywhere near a dock.  The trip TO Bar Harbor I was on a contracted dinner cruise type boat (good sized) but on the way back to the ship I was on one of our ship’s own tenders which are really fancy lifeboats but somewhat better equipped.  For lunch I ate at West Street Cafe and had a spicy chicken sandwich and coleslaw.  Though there are a few deep fried items on the ship, they seem few and far between so it hit the spot as did the blueberry mule.   Other than the trips to and from and the lunch, Bar Harbor wasn’t my favorite.  Far more than any of the Canadian cities we visited, Ba
Read more

Sunday March 24th - Saturday March 30th 2024 - Work trip to Las Vegas - many miles of walking but no ‘walks’

Image
What a week this has been.  At work I’ve been one of the more vocal team members advocating for a cautious and measured journey into the cloud hosted future.  For over a year it has been a rollercoaster of hearing that we were probably going to do a huge forklift style cloud migration then a few weeks later hearing we’d just stay at our current awful managed provider and then a few weeks later that we would probably buy and host our own server farm.  This decision cycle repeated a number of times and I did my best to be as  blasé  as I could be about it since it seemed like the process would go on forever. Then, with surprising rapidity, the decision was made and a lot of money spent buying our own equipment which we are going to operate out of a Las Vegas based datacenter that the West coast half of the pre-merger company has been using for a few years. This week was the week when the parts finally all shipped (there were a lot of delays from HP) and the trip to implement it all was f
Read more