Road Trips and Hike Reports

We tried to do a good hike on Friday the 23rd, part of my Birthday get away weekend up near the Canadian border.  Unfortunately, the recent rains and more poor trail maintenance meant we were only able to go in about 1.2 miles before getting to a stream crossing that we couldn't realistically do without prior preparation and had to turn around.  So it was about a 2.4 mile walk but not long enough for us to count as a 'hike'. Today's hike was a revisit of a hike we did last year in July.  Knowing how this loop was laid out from our previous experience, we opted to start with the sizable road walk (about 1.5 miles?) instead of ending with it.  The road walk was downhill and part of it has a beautiful stream next to it.  The road is so quiet and scenic it really isn't a big demerit to the hike overall.  Unfortunately, the trail conditions today were  a demerit.  There were several trees down with awkward bushwhacks required to get around them.  At least 1.5 miles of t

Oh it's been a while since our last hike.  This was a good match for today.  It's relatively mild and nice outside but a little humid.  This hike is East of Ithaca so it was a fairly long drive (about an hour and 45 mins) but Sunday mornings are pretty chill and the drive was actually enjoyable both directions. Sometimes, when we are on a roll with hikes, 6.5 miles seems like a surprisingly modest hike.  While we still enjoyed being out there today, the miles did NOT fly by.  It felt like 6.5 long miles.  We've done this hike a few times before but at least one of them was in snow.  There are a ton of different loops that branch off of the main Finger Lakes Trail including the Swedish loop, Ukrainian loop and the English loop.  We should go back and try some of those other variations sometime.   One thing that made this hike feel fresh was that we did the loop in the opposite direction than usual which meant starting with the road walk instead of ending with it.  Last time