Road Trips and Hike Reports

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 ...

This was a leg stretcher for New Year's Eve.  The trail starts in Avon which is the home of both a giant Barilla factory and the location where all the Cool Whip in America is made.  It's strange what incredibly common products come from this small town that lots of people have never heard of. The Erie Attica trail uses a short segment old railroad just over 1 mile long which connects Avon to the 90 mile long Genesee Valley Greenway .  After walking that out and back we also walked a little curvy sidewalk thing that was probably paid for by Barilla when they built their facility.