Road Trips and Hike Reports

A rare urban walk for us. It was pretty warm last Sunday (as it is THIS Sunday the 6th of July) so an early close walk was the right fit for the day.  We started off in the Maplewood neighborhood of Rochester and mostly walked along the Genesee River.  There are a series of interesting elevated walkways in the river gorge near the zoo but stretching for quite a distance along the river.  They are actually built like highway overpasses (no part of it was touching ground directly, it was a long onramp type structure) and it provides some really great views and a sense of being around nature but sort of not in it. The photos are mostly from the pond area in the actual park at the point where we turned around.  It was an enjoyable walk and there were very few people on the path.  

We booked this trip a long time ago and later changed from a Hilton hotel in Montreal to a Hotwire booked mystery hotel in Laval.  It seemed like Memorial Day weekend would never get here but it finally did.  My employer has a once annual company holiday that is named after the company and over the few years it's been around the day has varied considerably.  This year they made it the Friday before Memorial day, effectively giving us all a 4 day weekend which was great for this trip. We drove up Friday and had a long and not too expensive casino visit on the way.  It meant we got into Montreal pretty late but surprisingly, the drive on NY 104, I-81 and Ontario-401 and on into Montreal on the A-20 etc was all very very good.  There really wasn't any objectionable traffic anywhere.    We also had a dinner that exceeded our expectations at Kelsey's Roadhouse in Brockville Ontanio, not far after crossing into Canada. Oddly I chose it by just using Go...

This was an after hike to capitalize on the beautiful weather we are having this week.  Fishers park is in the same town we live in and has a variety of landscapes.  I've wondered before if the normal outer loop we walk along the perimeter of the park would total 3 miles.  It definitely doesn't, it's about 2.5 miles.  So we took a trail that goes up the middle of the park and wandered around on the ridge line and then looped back so we'd have over 3 miles. Trail plot

Reading about this trail it sounded like a typical rail trail.  It's quite close to urban Ithaca so I imagined a lot of buildings around it and probably quite a few people.  It turns out this is a beautiful strip of nearly level old rail bed that feels surprisingly isolated.  Many of the side trails lead into Ithaca's Six Mile Creek natural area. Temperatures were in the 20's with a wind chill in the teens and those temps, combined with a few inches of snow, made this a very wintery hike.  The distances on the signage and mile markers along the trail made no sense to me.  Going south (we parked at the seeming north end of the trail) some mile markers were counting up and some counted down.  One set had a brown background on the mile markers and another had a slightly blue background.  The signs at the 2 ends of the trail we hiked seemed to confirm that we indeed walked the entirety of the trail based on the maps they showed.  Yet those same signs...

This was an unusual hike in that it was suburban and close to home but over 5 miles long.  We’d never been to and I had never even heard of Gosnell Big Woods Preserve but it came up on AllTrails and seemed like a good way to get a satisfying hike without a long drive.  We’re traveling to Vermont next weekend so extra driving didn’t seem like a great idea especially since it was supposed to rain later in the day.  On the way we tried eating at Original Steve’s Diner in Penfield.  They are opening a Steve’s in Victor and I was curious to see what we can look forward to. This hike had a variety of terrains from nearly flat creekside trail to woodsy and undulating with some intriguing hills with dips and little valleys.