Road Trips and Hike Reports

Through a series of family events we ended up being offered some credit at HTR resorts Niagara that the family from North Carolina wasn’t able to use as they had planned.  We looked over our calendar and chose this weekend to check it out. We drove to Niagara after work Friday night and it was an easy trip thanks to some Google Maps offering some clever alternatives to the very busy I-90 and US-20 obvious routes.  It was a pretty good drive. HTR resorts gets a passing grade from us for sure.  The grounds are meticulously clean, the bathrooms are really clean and well equipped and there are a ton of activities from bonfires to zip-lines, all of which are, I think, included in the stay price.  Which is good because this was, by about 2x, the most expensive Yurt we’ve ever stayed in.  I think our total for 2 nights was over 360 dollars, some of which was gifted to us but some we paid ourselves.  Being a nice fall weekend, there were a ton of families with chi...

This was a really enjoyable 4 mile hike through pleasant woods with some decent little climbs that ended at a pond.  The funny thing about it is that the pond it ends at is someplace we've been SEVERAL times and our car was parked just a few hundred feet up the road from the pond.  If we'd gone literally 500 feet farther down the road from where we parked we would have realized this wasn't a new hike to us at all.  It's actually the same area that I've inaccurately called Labrador Hollow before.  In truth, Labrador Hollow is just over the hill from where we walked today.  We've done the connecting trail from Spruce Pond to the real Labrador Hollow in the past. After a series of nice mild days, temps this weekend are back into the 80's.  We could have done a second loop around another pond to make the trail a figure 8 of sorts but I decided that an enjoyed 4 mile hike was more appealing to me than a hot, sweaty and tiring 7+ miler.     We also got...

I'm writing this almost a week after our trip ended.  We actually got home on Sunday the 28th around 4 pm but I've been dating the blog posts with the day I'm writing them which is usually covering the day or 2 before the writing.  To keep that inconsistently consistent I'm dating this entry for Monday the 29th which was actually my first day back at work. We left Madison fairly early Saturday morning.  Embassy Suites has a well known full breakfast with made-to-order eggs so we actually ate breakfast at the hotel.  The trip on I-94 to Milwaukee went well and we had a few hours to kill before boarding the ferry for Michigan.  We walked around the third ward of Milwaukee which was very charming. We had a treat at the public market , I bought sunglasses at Warby Parker and overall we got a couple of miles in walking around this very historic but gentrified section of town.  The public markets in big cities are kind of amusing to me.  Ostensibly they are...

After our great breakfast at the River District hotel, we headed towards Madison.  We had a nice loop hike picked out for the University of Wisconsin arboretum but it was pretty warm and humid by the time we got near Madison.  We ended up just going straight to our hotel with the plan that we could park the car and wander around town until check-in time.  Surprisingly, they let us check-in VERY early, about 11:30 am.  Our room was gorgeous with a floor to ceiling window overlooking Madison's growing downtown.   After dropping out stuff and using the bathroom etc, we headed out to walk around Madison and have lunch.  State Street is Madison's pedestrian shopping street that starts at the Capitol building and goes many blocks West towards the UW campus.  It was pretty warm but by preferring the shady side of the street we managed to avoid overheating.  We spontaneously decided to eat at Noodles & Company because we like it and there aren'...