Road Trips and Hike Reports

This was a revisit to a place we went once before years ago.  The scenery was great and the cool mild weather felt more like April than the first day in June.  We saw only 1 other set of hikers during our time on the trail.  Brian wasn't feeling great and I had a situation to deal with at work so we cut the 6.8 mile hike that Alltrails had plotted out down to 4.8.  Hopefully we can do a little longer hike next time but this was enjoyable as it was.  

It's Memorial day and the weather Saturday and Sunday was wetter than people surely hoped for.  Today was sunny and dry which was great but I'm very thankful we got an early start since there were sure to be a ton of people out and about on this one sunny holiday day.  We arrived at the trailhead before 8:30 am after a breakfast at McDonlad's along the way. The trail wasted no time in getting the adventure started.  Within 3 minutes we had a challenging stream crossing to do.  With all the rain we've been getting, the stream had a lot of water in it.  Thankfully, the stream bed is very wide and shallow at the stream crossing point but we still had to struggle to determine the best spot to do the crossing. The first few steps were on little flat pieces of slimy rock just poking out of the stream and then one big step that had to land on a very pointy rock before the last, relatively easy step could be taken.  Brian found a good stick and it helped make the m...

There is a beautiful but short well marked trail loop that can be started at the Pennsylvania Lumber museum and walks along a beautiful forested creek then crosses over the creek and comes back along a short piece of a longer trail.  I've wanted to revisit this trail for a long time and finally we made it to try a little more. Ulysses PA is over 2 hours away so it was a good day to get an early start.  The drive down was good but it was a little wet and misty much of the way and we were expecting dry weather.  We parked on the west side of the creek (the opposite side of the creek from the museum) and headed North on the trail.  Soon we were past the relatively short portion we covered last time we went to the museum and the trail continued on staying near the creek.  Some parts of the trail were very wet and the sections with thicker coverings of grass got the bottom of our jeans pretty wet.   I noticed a strange trail blaze along the main trail (whic...

Brian and I had both been to Toronto years before but we'd never been together.  My memories of it from back in the day were that it felt like an extra clean Chicago.  My trip to the DC airport, flight to Toronto and getting downtown to meet up with Brian all went well.  Brian's train was a little late but I hung out at the train station Italian restaurant and had what turned out to be some astonishingly expensive wine while I waited.  Brian joined when he got in and we had dinner there before walking to our hotel.  The hotel, Hotel Victoria, was kind of quirky but ultimately was a fine place to spend a quick 2 nights. Saturday started off with us talking to a bagel shop quite a ways from our hotel.  We got to see a big stretch of downtown Toronto on the way.  Unfortunately, Toronto seems to look about like most of the other Canadian cities (Vancouver excepted) that I've spent time in.  There are a fair amount of unoccupied buildings and a lot of ...

Wrapping up in DC.  I tried a very elegant bakery near the hotel, Tette Bakery.  Although it isn’t setup physically at all like a Panera Bread, it’s really a very fancy Panera Bread in terms of menu and food.  My sausage breakfast sandwich had (by request0 a beautiful soft cooked egg which Panera no longer offers but was let down by a hard crunchy half green tomato slice that shouldn’t have been put on there. I attended my last conference session here.  It was really fun actually because the presenter was irreverent and charismatic.  Certainly the only presentation that had more than the most forced chuckle of humor.  I stopped back at the hotel (late checkout appreciated so I didn’t have to use bellman to watch my bags this morning) and get ready to head out. It’s been an amazing 3 days in DC. Great weather, clean enjoyable city experiences, nice people interactions overall.  For a big East Coast city, visits don’t get much better than this for me. ...

Our morning started at the Starbucks in the hotel lobby.  Brian and I end up at Startbucks MAYBE 4 times a year since neither of us drink coffee at all and basically not tea either.  That said, I’ve always liked their food offerings just fine and I thought a break from bagels would be appropriate today. The conference was the same format as yesterday, keynote in the morning then 1 break-out then lunch and more break-outs.  I only had 2 things I wanted to attend today and 1 was very good the other was just ok.  Lunch today was a build your own taco bowl and it was more flavorful and interesting than yesterday’s cold sandwich bar. I was back at the hotel about 4 pm and decided that, despite my original plans, I would go ahead and do laundry before getting home.  I ended up changing clothes a little more often than I thought I would so doing laundry now lets me have a nicer shirt for tomorrow (instead of a t-shirt) and my jeans will be fresh instead of less fresh f...

I was ready to go in the morning, recharged after a fun but long day Tuesday.  We went to the same bagel shop as the day before and my manager tried the New Jersey staple of the Pork Roll sandwich and I had the same for the 2nd day in a row.  It’s rare to fine pork roll at all outside the NYC metro area and even rarer to find some place that gets all the details right with salt, pepper and ketchup.  Pearl’s is a very cute bagel place and they even have nice outdoor seating like a little bistro or something.  Very unusual for a small shop. As soon as we went up the escalator into the main hall, it was apparent that this was not as modest a gathering as I might have imagined.  There seemed to be a ton of people milling around.  We attended one early break-out session before the keynote session started.  The keynote probably serves mentally, though not officially, as the start of the conference.  That first break-out was ok but I didn’t really get m...

To say that Rochester’s airport is calm at 4:15 am on a Tuesday in May is kind of understating it.  I was able to walk directly up to the American Airlines ticketing line and speak to somebody about completing my check-in which, for whatever reason, I couldn’t complete online yesterday.  I was also able to score a first class upgrade for 44 dollars.  Checking a bag was 35 anyway and with first class that’s included so it’s really a 9 dollars upgrade.  If I get ANY extra sleep from my bigger seat it’s worth it. Yesterday was not a relaxing day at all.  I started my workday early, trying to remember as many little fiddly things as I could wrap up before my travels.  I had a staff meeting at 11, a cat nail trim appointment at 2 pm and several household chores as well as packing to get done.  My dad is unfortunately having some problems with his laptop connecting to the internet which I was unable to solve.  It was a frustrating 94 minute call trying ...

This was a nice leg stretcher after a day of visiting Brian's family in Vermont.  Ayers Cliff is very near the part of Vermont where Brian's family lives but I'd never been before.  The trail we walked paralleled the Ticehurst stream which wasn't super exciting but the quiet Canadian landscape was relaxing.  

I'm very late in writing this up.  It was a short hike that we managed to slip into a rainy March day.  The main destination for the day was actually the Blenheim-Gilboa Power Station .  Being almost into the Catskills, this was a much longer than usual drive for a day trip but it was perfect for filling up a rainy cool day. This was nice, well developed state park and it was pretty much just us there on this day.  The power station was also deserted and we got a personal impromptu tour with a very charismatic and knowledgeable docent.  

We did this hike once before , in deep snow and bitter cold back in 2023.  It was a great snow hike and I'm not sure how it eluded a revisit for so long. It's kind of a long drive but it was again a hike that delivered more than the pictures will probably convey with lots of ups and downs and some good water features here and there. We saw one other hiker and crossed paths with one other but it was very peaceful and secluded feeling.

St Clarisville OH was really an inexpensive convenient alternative to staying at the Wheeling Island Casino in Wheeling WV.  We went to the casino late Sunday night so our start Monday morning wasn't very early.  The drive home was partly up OH-7, a highway which very closely follows the scenic but sometimes industrial Ohio river for hundreds of miles along Ohio's border with West Virginia and Indiana amongst a few other states I think.  We took it from St Clairsville to East Liverpool or about 60 miles.  From there I tried OH-170 north out of East Liverpool about 30 slow but scenic miles until Petersburg Ohio, along the Pennsylvania border.  From there we took local roads North and East going past the bizarrely named municipality of S.N.J.P Pennsylvania , the first few paragraphs at least of the Wikipedia page about it are worth reading. Next up we drove on the farthest North (and free) 20 miles of PA-376, a road generally associated closely with tolls and Pitt...

On a previous trip across country (on the way home from Oregon with hope chests I think) I had stopped at Martin State forest off US-50 in Indiana and wanted to come back when we could hike there.  So when we were getting to the end of our planned time in Memphis I played with routes and decided our trip home could swing through this scenic hilly part of Indiana. Martin State forest was only an hour from Jasper so we hiked in the late morning after a leisurely start from our hotel.  There is a hike in Alltrails in Martin State Forest but I wanted to go back to the exact spot I had been before and hoped to find a good trail from there.  We found some trails for sure but the trail map wasn't super helpful and Alltrails only had a map for one of the trails that passed through that section of the park. We tried following signs (shown below) for some lake that was 1 mile away but the trail soon branched and headed steeply downhill in the direction we went and going the other ...