Road Trips and Hike Reports

This was just a quick walk on the way to dinner at Cracker Barrel.  We went to this park once before but this time we took nearly every junction along the trail to take us to the outer extremities of the roughly rectangular shape of the park.  There is a main trail that makes a slightly shorter loop around the park but the outer areas we went to this time included a little more variety in terrain. It was pretty humid and warm, one of those days when getting ANY hike in seems like an accomplishment.  

In terms of exercise this wasn't anything notable.  It was very close to home, nearly flat and we didn't walk particularly far.  What makes this little walk notable is that, despite being super close to home and on trails we've done parts of before, this was all new scenery that we didn't know existed. The Lehigh and Auburn trails are 2 different rail trails which cross at least once here in Victor.  We've walked on both of them before but this time we started at the Lehigh Crossing park which we hadn't been to before. Very close to where we parked was a long pond with at least 5 turtles sunning themselves on logs.  Brian absolutely loves to see turtles so he was super excited.  There was also a large railroad bridge where the Lehigh crossed the Auburn railroads.  We've done several hikes on different sections of these trails and it's all very close to home and seemingly in a built up area but here was an entire section that was new to us.

I wanted to come up with an 'adventure' for the day.  Not just a hike or just a city walk but something of a combination.  I started out by looking for Buffalo urban walks online and found this trail along the harbor.  At least part of it is called the Fuhrmann trail. We got an early start on the day and had breakfast at Panera along the way.  This trail runs along the harbor and our walk started with a very strange horseshoe shaped jaunt around a strange dead end along the Union Ship Canal, a very historic but short canal that connected the harbor of Buffalo with a series of industrial works, most notably the Lackawanna steel company.  I don't think I've ever seen a canal come to an abrupt dead end like this before.  It seems like it was probably used to park ships for unloading.  The state has done a lot of work to repair and remediate the canal to make it suitable for various forms of aquatic plant and animal life.  At the very end of the canal...

I thought this would be a park we'd never been to before but when we actually arrived it seemed like this was just another part of Whiting Road nature preserve.  It was certainly a different section of trail than we've done before and Whiting Road nature preserve is a really great park for a suburban city park. The Alltrails description for this hike said we were unlikely to encounter other hikers and it was certainly the case today.  Parts of the trail were a little muddy and some had light overgrowth.  I kind of expeted a wide gravel covered trail so we didn't bring the hiking boots or bug spray.  Still, for a 'pre-dinner' weeknight hike, it was good.  

I presented Brian with 3 options for getting some sort of hike in for our day.  1 was relatively close to home, one was really close to home and the third was from a brochure I had laying around in a basket of travel ideas.  The brochure was about the Allegheny area of Pennsylvania and included a decent list of hiking ideas but very little detail about each one.  Based on just a nice photo and the desire to have our adventure take up most of the day, we headed out to Bradford PA, just south of the NY border. The reservoir is a really beautiful body of water.  There are a few different trails but we wanted to walk the 'Marilla Bridge Trail' but we knew very little about it.  Though described in the brochure as a 2.2 mile trail, it actually goes on considerably farther.  It starts by going over the namesake bridge then around half the reservoir before heading off deeper into a lushly forested area.  We only went about as far as the brochure brochure said...

This was a nice little hike that we haven't done before.  We bumped into a few people on the trail who were all part of a group of 6 people doing a hike together.  They didn't know where the others in their group were at relative to each other so it was fun telling them there was just 1 person in front of them or that they were the last group etc.    

Clearly this wasn't an expedition.  It was a brief stop on the way to dinner but it was a nice way to enjoy the longer days of spring.   Brian found a ring on the ground which I took back to the park the next day.

 Sometimes hikes that start out seemingly like sad compromises end up being great.  Since we came all the way home (albeit very late) Sunday night, we both had Monday off. Though I was not full of energy after the late night drive home, my first inclination was to find a 'normal' nature trail sort of hike.  Brian wanted something with a good distance but didn't want to need to weak hiking boots.  After some Alltrails scouring I found this trail loop but thought it was largely a repeat hike of the Trolley Trail we had hiked in the past which runs behind NY-31 in the rail bed of a former interurban train.  This turned out to be mostly NOT that same trail and it was a lot more interesting than I expected.   This loop starts at a parking lot near a popular restaurant rich piece of the Erie canal.  As you head west along the canal it quickly gets quieter.  It then heads North through a long and narrow easement used for some small power lines.  It ...

We headed out from the apartment about 9 am after loading the car up and saying goodbye to the cat.  Our first flight doesn't leave (from Buffalo) until almost 4 pm so we had a lot of time to kill.  Breakfast was a bagel at Bruegger's and then we headed west on US-20.  As planned, we stopped at Como Lake Park , an enormous Erie county park that we visited once before.  It was nice getting a good leg stretcher in with warm dry weather.  We are both wearing jeans today so we're thankful it was just in the 70's when we walked. From Como Lake Park to the airport was only a 20 minute trip and we were picked up by the parking shuttle driver immediately so didn't have any hanging out time.  I forgot to grab my normal driving glasses but my prescription hiking sunglasses should work for driving and I do have my reading glasses with me also.   Getting through check-in, baggage and security was all very fast with no line to speak of.  We ate in the air...