Road Trips and Hike Reports

As members and supporters of the Finger Lakes Trail Conference, we get their magazine covering trail projects, stories about through hikers and members who have made substantial time and effort commitments to the organization.  The last issue we got talked about a new piece of trail that connects Kinsella park (a city park in Corning NY) to an existing part of the Crystal Hills Trail.  The CHT is about 45 miles long and, based on my minimal research, connects from the PA state line to a junction with the Finger Lakes Trail in NY.   It is also part of the ' Great Eastern Trail ' which is a developing long-distance trail network that spans the Eastern US from North to South. The article was really about the news of the little connector trail between the city park and the existing CHT segment and also that a piece of the CHT now goes through Corning Glass lands which eliminates what used to be a road walk.  It wasn't a how-to or even a why-to on using the new trail...

Brian didn't want to get up as early as I did on this, our unexpected day at home before returning to work.  Since it was going to be really warm (near 90) on the 2nd day we were going to be at Ohiopyle State Park in Pennsylvania, we opted to head home Monday instead of spending a 2nd night in our yurt.  While it would have been nice to have our full 2 night yurt camping trip, it was nice coming home Monday and having all of Tuesday to do something different with.   I got up early and got blood work drawn for an upcoming medical appointment. I also needed to go to Best Buy to try and find a new laptop for my father who has been having frequent crashes on his Dell Latitude.  I had about an hour and a half between getting blood drawn and Best Buy opening plus it was going to be pretty warm here too.  So I decided to squeeze an unplanned mini hike into the time and opportunity I had.  The Crescent trail is a wonderful trail network that is very close to u...

 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 ...

Just another chance to get a qualifying hike in after work.  Once time falls back an hour this will be nearly impossible for months.  Scenery and conditions were very good as was the tranquility on this Halloween afternoon.

This was a chance to get another weeknight hike in and in fact is the location we originally planned to go to last Wednesday.  This delightful little park is one piece of land but it's fairly crisply divided into 2 landscapes.  There is a low lying section with a lot of wetlands and stream side trail and there is a very hilly hardwood tree covered part.  Especially right now with the last bits of fall colors spicing the view up, I'm a lot more excited by the hilly area than the flat area.  Getting to our arbitrary 3 mile minimum for a 'qualifying' hike requires hiking the ENTIRETY of the perimeter of this park and even then it comes up a tiny bit short of 3 miles. With that in mind, we started off going up the very thickly covered hill leading up from the ever popular Pickle ball court.  We then walked the yellow trail which isn't very long but, unlike most of the trails, this beautiful trail goes down a ravine and circles a scenic knob with a picnic table on it...

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.

The weather forecast was positively dreadful for the weekend.  We decided in the middle of the week that we would embrace the bad weather by choosing something that didn’t rely on good weather.  So I redeemed some Hyatt points for a 1 night stay at the Hyatt Regency Columbus and we stated Friday night on the way at a casino in Salamanca NY . The casino night was fun but ran late.  The drive went pretty well despite Ohio’s larger than average number of dorky passing lane hogs.  Even 15 years ago when I would go to Ohio with Drew (who is from Ohio) it always seemed like people were on sedatives there.  They have big freeways though with 3 lanes or more each way even in rural areas so that helped.  I was surprised to see signs for Mansfield on the way.  Mansfield is home of the catchily named ‘North Central Ohio Industrial Museum’ which came on my radar as a possible stop on a trip to or from Indiana I hope to make at some point.  So we diverted to ...