Road Trips and Hike Reports

Family obligations come in all sorts of forms.  When my grandmother died a few years ago, she had made it clear that she wanted me to inherit some of her household belongings.  In her end of life period, she lived in an assisted living facility and she took almost nothing from her normal adult life into that facility.  The family helped her furnish her little apartment but nothing in there was anything that had any meaning to anybody since it was all new stuff and very unremarkable almost dorm like furniture.  When she actually died, most of the 'grandma and grandpa' furniture was already gone and I couldn't/wouldn't or didn't make the effort to come get any of it from Oregon.  To be honest it all seemed to happen in silence and I wasn't really aware of the process but even if I was fully aware I'm not sure it would have changed the outcome.  Still, I wanted to make sure that I did end up with some things that had that sense of family history.  Thankfully,

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

It's not a walk that gets us any mountaineering cred but this was a wonderful snowy walk very close to home. Normally we try to get an early start for any good size hike we hope to do on a weekend day.  It snowed Friday night (about 4 or 5 inches) and it was still snowing in the morning which didn't energize us at all. So we ran some errands and had lunch etc but later in the afternoon we needed a walk of some sort just to stay occupied.  I originally suggested walking the neighborhood loop but Brian had the idea of going to Mertensia Park. I was surprised how much snow there was on the ground at the park because around the apartment complex they have plowed and salted and there just aren't a lot of big areas where you can really appreciate exactly how much snow you have.  At the park it was clear there was more snow than I initially thought and the number of people who had walked on it was pretty small. We've gone to this park a number of times but since it's a rai

Our old frenemy, the 50 Hikes in Centra NY Book struck again.  It said that there were several trails in this area and that combining them with SOME truck trail (dirt road) walks you could make a variety of loops to hike.  That was probably true when the book was written but today even the parking area referenced has been completely stripped of any signage or trail blazes.  We ended up guessing where he was talking about but several things about it didn’t make sense.  Still, I correctly guessed that we had instead ended up starting out on the truck trail and that if we turned left (West) at the first junction we would probably find the ‘red trail’.  And there was a series of things that all fit the description so I’m quite confident we were on the right roads we just did the hike backwards.  But the Red Trail is scarcely visible as a path now and coming from the direction we came it had absolutely no markings.  We ended up going back to the parallel gravel road and only later did we se

Where to hike after a wet week? This rail to trail corridor seemed like it might be a less muddy than some other places we could have gone.  This portion of the trail starts near a creek which has a lot of water in it.  We've been here a few times.  We turned around at a point where the trail went along the edge of a farmer's field which was very muddy.  After this hike we went on a sort of long drive to get Brian's hair cut at the Great Clips with the shortest wait time which was about 30 miles from the hike.  After all that we had a good lunch at Monte Alban's Mexican Grill . 

This was an after hike to capitalize on the beautiful weather we are having this week.  Fishers park is in the same town we live in and has a variety of landscapes.  I've wondered before if the normal outer loop we walk along the perimeter of the park would total 3 miles.  It definitely doesn't, it's about 2.5 miles.  So we took a trail that goes up the middle of the park and wandered around on the ridge line and then looped back so we'd have over 3 miles. Trail plot

Watkins Glen is best known for it's auto racing and the State Park which shares the name of the city.  Our hike came from a printed series of maps I bought from the Finger Lakes Trail Conference a few years ago.  Most of them are 'traily' hike loops in the woods. This one had a lot of road walks and though it starts in the Watkins Glan State Park parking lot, it doesn't actually go into the state park at all and certainly not into the famous gorge that is the main feature of the park. The weather today was astounding.  It was about 70 degrees at the high point and cloudless with just occasionally light breezes. We actually wore shorts and were really glad we did.  The hike started walking through residential streets of Watkins Glen then South along a rail bed that goes from railroad to abandoned rail bed exactly at a bridge over Glen Creek which is now just a foot bridge.    The high school's athletic field obliterates about 1/3 of a mile of the rail bed but the ro