Road Trips and Hike Reports

 This evening walk was an attempt to just get some more miles in after the morning's tough start.  It was nothing special and it was still very hot and humid.

 This was a revisit to Rob's trail which leads down to Hemlock Lake.  We noticed the other time we were here that there is a junction, not very far into the trail, that leads off to Canadice Lake.  Canadice lies just East of Hemlock Lake and is considerably smaller.  The connector trail let us back up the little bit of hill we had gone down and then veered back towards the same road we were parked along (unsurprisingly) to get to the other side.  Unfortunately, on the other side of NY-15A, the trail was more grass than dirt and instead of forested it was more of a set of scrubby fields.  The grass was wet and there were multiple unlabeled junctions.  We muddled around for a little bit but I was hot and sweaty and not in the best mood. Finally we came to a junction where it appeared one trail went down to the lake immediately and the other was a mystery. We opted to take the mystery trail and it eventually curved around and rejoined the path we'd alread...

 This was a quick after work walk but it was an interesting experience.  Along NY-96 there are several trailheads that look almost the same. One of them is for the Ontarios Pathways which is a rails to trails network that is sizable.  This trailhead, closest to our house, was one we'd never checked out.  It certainly has a nice start with a creek immediately next to the trail. Unlike Ontario Pathways, this trail really doesn't go very far.  Yet in theory at least it has some real transportation use since it does go from one side of Manchester to the other.  We walked the length of it then enjoyed a quiet few moments along Flint Creek in Shortsville which is where the Gateway trail seems to end. Shortsville is my imagined ideal spot to buy a house. The village has a really unusually beautiful creek flowing through it and a few places to eat and seems so welcoming and inviting and neither snotty nor junky. It was pretty warm out but this was a nice after work...

It was going to be another hot day but we still managed to get up and head out on a good hike.  This was not a hike I'd looked at before but it was right along Hemlock lake which is apparently one of the least developed of the Finger lakes.  Interestingly, the trail head for this hike WAS somewhere I'd seen before. In fact I tried to take note of it when I was driving the moving van almost exactly a year ago.  But I didn't write down the location and our previous travels never took us past this particular spot on NY-15A. This was a favorite hike for both of us.  The setting even at the start is gorgeous.  There was almost no traffic noice, the lake had only a few quiet boats on it and there are no houses or obvious signs of human influence along the whole trail.  The first mile leads steadily down from the top of the valley down to a beautiful overlook that will probably be full of water some other time of year.  Even absent the water it was a nice s...