Road Trips and Hike Reports

This was a steep hike with a lot of ups and downs in a very quiet small multiple use area near Attica.  It was getting pretty hot out but I enjoyed the concentrated exercise this short hike provided on the way home from Buffalo.

This super suburban hike exceeded my expectations in so many ways.  It's at a park I've heard of but had never been to and at 3.7 miles, not a hike we would normally leave our house and drive almost to Buffalo for.  Since the plan for this weekend was to spend 2 nights in Buffalo this worked out well.  Brian worked until almost 3 pm Saturday so by the time we got to the park it was after 5 pm which gave us plenty of daylight for this walk. A lot of things were surprising about this park and the trails.  The park is absolutely enormous with over a dozen numbered day-use areas.  Picnic areas, horseshoe pits, baseball diamonds, other sports fields.  On this gorgeous Saturday afternoon on a holiday weekend, there were a few hundred people at the park and yet most of the parking lots were only 1/3 or less full. It's just an immense place that is almost certainly overbuilt for 99% of the year.  The trail network was extensive with lots of junctions and options and TONS of boardwa

 We went out Wednesday to run an errand in town. On the way home I thought about trying to walk near the Valentown Historic site which is very close to the mall in Victor.  We drive by that site many times each week and I'd seen on Alltrails that there is a trail that goes near it but it's not really marked as a trailhead.   Valentown is one of the oldest buildings in the area and it currently serves as a museum. It aparently used to be a general store or something similar.  We're going to make sure we visit the museum this year once their season starts after Memorial day. This trail was really fun.  Weaving its way through very familiar suburban areas near our house, we never would have known there even was a trail there.  Lots of ups and downs and despite the nearby roads and buildings, it feels like the trail itself is very unknown. After the hike we went to depart the parking lot when my eyes were drawn to the ground.  I opened my car door when I was near what I saw an

 To be honest, I don't remember a lot of details from this hike as I'm writing it up on May 28th.  It was an area we hadn't been to and we enjoyed it but I'm short on detail.

 This was mostly an exercise hike.  The plan for the day was to go to Skaneateles NY for a little city exploring adventure on one of the first nice warm days of the season. Since the city walking wouldn't involve a lot of actual exercise, I wanted to get some energy out early in the day.  So we went to our favorite, much repeated, close to home hike. The rest of the day was enjoyable. Skaneateles was kind of busy since it's not far from Syracuse and the weather was totally perfect so we were hardly the only people who thought of going there.  Still, Google maps came up with a really fun back road route and we enjoyed our day.