August 11, 2024 - Spanish Loop trail - Dryden NY (Topkins county) - 6.5 miles, about 850 feet elevation gain

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 we did this hike the first snow of the season started falling just as we were finishing our hike and it was very romantic. Today, it started pouring rain for the last 15 minutes of the hike.  Entertaining but not as lovely as the snow.  The streams along this hike were all rolling along very well because we've had a few wet days lately.  They were really beautiful and Brian took a few short videos which I'm posting at the end of this blog entry.

We had a modest Taco Bell dinner on the way home.









 
 

 


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