Road Trips and Hike Reports

This is day 1 of our week+ long road trip through VT/CT/PA and WV.  We went for this hike in the Adirondacks.  The weather was pleasant but still a little humid.  Nobody had signed into the trail register for 5 days and the trailhead was not on a highway or even a slightly busy side road so the whole hike had a good feeling of remoteness.  There were a lot of rocks and roots, typical for Eastern NY.  Some of the trees seemed bigger than we typically see in the Finger Lakes.  It was a perfectly enjoyable walk to the lake and the lake itself was gorgeous and kind of a prize because I'm pretty sure hiking is the only way to get to it.  We opted not to walk very far around the lake itself because despite the modest elevation gain, it seemed like a relatively challenging hike in.  We both had insane busy weeks leading up to Friday and I suspect that plus the warm humid day impacted our energy level somewhat. Still, we made it to the lake and got in a healthy distance of walking. We were

This used to be our very favorite and most repeated hike near home.  We just kind of fell out of the habit of going to this particular place.  Today was going to be another warm (80F) and humid day so something relatively close was a plus so we could get our hike done earlier in the day.  We also messaged our friend Fred who lives VERY close to Wesley Hill and he joined us along with 2 new dogs he has that we hadn't met before.  Fred also laid out many of the trails at the preserve and continues to perform trail maintenance there.    Fred's new dogs are good trail walkers and both were very friendly handsome creatures.  It was the perfect hike for the day. 

I'm writing this on day 3 of the 4 days we are in Albany.  If anything exciting happens tonight I can revise this as needed. We've been to Albany just a few times before and only once before on an overnight stay downtown.  Thankfully, we're enjoying our visit more this time than in the past.  When we stayed before (just as a sleepover stop on the way home from Vermont) everything seemed dirty and old and we had a really disappointing expensive meal that left us unsatisfied. This trip started on Friday after a shortened work day.  I dropped Brian off at work in the morning, headed into Rochester to replace a part on a server and do some other tasks at our factory and then headed home to finish trip prep.  We were on the road by about 3:30 pm and the drive to Albany was super easy and seemed shorter than we remembered.  We checked into our room at the Hilton Albany. I chose a room at the end of the shorter of the 2 hallways in the hotel.  This turned out to be a good move sin

This was the first day of our 4 day trip to Albany for an HR conference Brian attended.  The drive from Albany to the hike was very easy, almost all down I-87 in light Saturday morning traffic. We got about .25 miles down the trail when I was bitten by an insect and Brian had one on his shirt collar.  So we returned to the car to apply bug repellent.  This little false start caused us to do only one of the two interlocking loops we would have otherwise done. It wasn't hot but it was kind of humid so we opted to do about 4.6 miles of the original 7 miles planned. Despite our lack of ambition to finish this hike, it wasn't at all a disappointment.  The terrain in this part of NY is a lot different than the Finger Lakes region we are usually hiking in.  There were all sorts of interesting granite ledges and outcroppings all over and the trail was fairly rocky.  The hike started going by one pond or small lake then climbing up the bluff on the other side and passing a 2nd body of w

This was a close to home hike in the evening after Brian got out of Target at 4 pm.  The weather today was amazing, the high temperature was barely 70 and humidity low.  There were only a few other cars at the park and we didn't really come very close to any other hikers on our walk. Boughton Park is jointly operated by Bloomfield and Victor villages and a permit to use the park is required to visit it.  We went a few times when we first moved to the area but then forgot to renew our permit for a while.  This was the outside perimeter of the whole park and was very enjoyable for a quick stroll.