On the Saturday before Easter I woke up to find Dad at the computer. He had been looking for a new trail to hike and found the Link Trail. According to the website, the Link Trail was created to connect the Finger Lakes Trail and the Old Erie Canal Trail. My understanding is that all three are part of the North Country Trail which is supposed to stretch all the way out to North Dakota. Parts of the Link Trail are along the road, so we decided to start at the closest non-road section which starts at the cemetery in Canastota. From there we walked to Nelson Road, which is about a 2 and a half mile hike, and back.

Since then we mapped out about 15 miles of the 39.1 mile trail over the course of around 5 hikes. The most recent, and furthest away hike we did was through the Nelson Swamp Unique Area which is the other side of Cazenovia. It’s been an interesting experience as the trail has taken us through people’s front yards, back yards, an “art” park and at one point through a cow pasture surrounded by an electric fence. Much of the trail is an old railroad bed and there are plenty of indications of that lying around. We’ve also seen some interesting plants which you can see below. For more about the trail and the sorts of things you can find along it, check out the blog dedicated to it.

[Joe]

At the end, the Union general got up and started yelling at the Confederates because they were “killing” the wounded. One of the Confederates got so tired of listening to him that he shot him. The Union general’s response was, “You missed. Got anything more?”. The Confederate shot him a second time and the response was “You missed again.” At that point the Confederate took his pistol by the barrel and used it as a club.

[Joe]

On Friday, in the midst of losing two straight games of Settlers, we took a break to look at spaceships. I spotted something that I thought was the ISS, but after I saw a much brighter object following the same path I figured the first was the shuttle and the second was the space station. By the way, I think Pete keeps victory points up his sleeves.

The weather on Saturday was better than had been predicted so without plans Dad and I decided to go some place. We finally settled on the Adirondacks even though we usually don’t go up there this early in the year. There’s a reason for that, as before we got out of Rome we saw a bit of snow. You have to understand, this has been an odd year in that we haven’t had a significant amount of snow in the yard for almost a month. We stopped to see if there was anybody climbing Bald, and even though the area was covered in snow there was one car in the parking lot. We continued on to Rocky, though not before heading into inlet to pick up some cinnamon donuts. The nice thing about Rocky is that most of the climb is on the south side so it was almost completely clear until the one section at the top where you approach the summit from the side.

The weather was crappy on Sunday so I caught up on my TV watching, had dinner with Nate, Jody and Andrew and played joePhone for Richard on his ride home.

[Joe]

The temperature here is supposed to get up to 45 today and we wanted to get out and enjoy it, so we looked around the falls website for something to do. Since there’s more water and less foliage this time of year we decided to revisit Oxbow Falls. We actually got to see the falls this time and they are a good size, but mostly cascades. More interesting were the ice formations around the streams and falls. We managed to find a mile long walk that took us over a few streams and then back to the start, which was much better than the path we took last time that had us wandering on to the frisbee golf course and out on to the road.

[Joe]

Fort building has become very popular, and fort destruction for that matter.

We went to a place called Ringing Rocks Park and yes the rocks did ring when hit with a hammer. I have videos to prove it, but I haven't crunched them yet.

Dominic has definitely taken to two-wheeling.

Luke's tricycle has a small turning radius, which is a good thing.

I made the mistake of trying to teach Caeden to high five, fist bump and honk my nose in the same weekend. Now his motion for all of them is the same, either that or I had a booger haging out of my nose all weekend.

The 'penguin game' was very popular, too.

Luke had a bit of trouble with the strategy, but managed to mess mine up on a couple of occasions.

There’s more in the photo album as usual.