Saturday March 23rd 2024 - Metensia Park - Farmington NY - 4.9 miles, 240 feet elevation gain

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 rail-trail, the length of the walk is almost entirely up to our whims.  We went considerably farther this time than we would on a day where we just wanted a leg stretcher. Also, almost at the end where we chose to turn around I noticed a small side trail that said 'The Glenn' and we explored that side trail.  It turned out not to be very long but it was pretty and twisted its way up a small hill where we assume it ended at a large apartment complex.

We really enjoyed out close to home walk and it turned out to be a delight, not a chore at all.











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