Caught In The Whirlwind
Posts tagged walking
Who Needs Trail Markers Anyway?
Sep 21st 2009
Berries And Flowers
This weekend, since the weather was so nice, my friends and I decided to go out to one of local town parks that has a bunch of trails in the woods. We were out there once before earlier in the year but the trails weren’t really marked at all and we ended up getting a little lost in the woods.
This time though, we went out earlier in the day in case we did end up getting lost. Which we did, but not as bad as before.
First of all, we really had no idea where the official trail entrance is. We wandered around a bit until we located the path we took to get on the first time with the intention of only following the marked paths and making as few turns as possible. Despite this method, on our way back, we ended up crossing a bridge that we hadn’t crossed on our way going. You would figure that you couldn’t mess up just walking straight back, but…there we were.
But thankfully, we were on a “marked” trail. I put marked in quotation marks because this is what the town considers to be a marked trail:
Trail Marker
You see the paint on that tree trunk there? Yeah, those are the trail markers. Usually these are invisible if you’re walking the trail in the wrong direction, or just plain hard to spot like this one.
Eventually we stumbled onto a wood marker post which pointed the direction back to the main foot path and we ended up getting out of the system without too much trouble. But man…we had hoped that they would have done some trail maintenance since the first time we went there. Obviously this was not the case. It was good to get outside though. The weather was really really nice.
Lost In The Park
May 19th 2009
It was really, really nice out yesterday. Just a little chilly, but sunny and warm enough to go outside and do some outdoors-y type things. So my friends and I wandered out to one of the local town parks in hopes that we could find some hiking trails through the woods like we did last weekend.
We went to a different park, but as we found out, it was just as large as the first one and had a lot more hiking trails. Enough to require a trail map to make sense of it. As we came to find out though…their trail map kinda sucked.
The first warning sign was that the trail map indicated an entrance to a trail that did not exist. We wandered down the road a little further and came to a path that lead into the woods that wasn't on the map, but we figured we'd follow it in anyway. It seemed to lead to a system of trails but we couldn't figure out where we were on the map. And a couple of intersections later we had lost track of where we were in relation to the park.
The trails themselves were pretty cool. Right in the woods, and through some interesting nature type areas. If we end up there next time I want to take my camera to get some pictures of some of the trees (if we can ever find the trees again that is) because they were really cool. It was a little bit muddy though. Like…a lot muddy. We were able to avoid most of it by cutting through the actual woods.
But, back to being lost. Eventually in our wanderings, we came across the back of a sign. As we passed it and turned around to see what it said we were surprised to find that it was warning us that the way we came was leaving the park land and the trails were going to become unmarked. At this point, we had two thoughts: "We left the park land???" and "The trails are supposed to be marked???"
Eventually we discovered that the trails were color coded. But the map was labeled with letters and no colors. So even if we found a trail, we had no idea which trail we were on or which direction we were supposed to be going on it. I have half a mind to write a really nasty letter to the town about their "map" and their "marked trails"
We stumbled off the park land again once more (also without being warned until we were back on) and then found ourselves on the red square trail…whichever trail that was supposed to be. Then we found the blue trail and realized that blue was "A" and we were back on the trail that we thought we were on from the beginning. Finally! Which was good because we were starting to get hungry.
We jumped off the trail at the first sign of the park showing up through the wilderness, but ended up walking into a bog type area. Ahhh…nature. What would a springtime walk be without mud. Eventually we found our way back to the park proper, although we ended up behind the maintenance building near where they store all the various pieces of equipment.
And thus ended our outdoors adventure for the day. It sounds like we've got a lot of options for outdoor walking in the area. A lot more than we thought we had. It's amazing what's local if you're actually looking for it.
Randomly Walking Through Nature
May 11th 2009
It's been another good weekend for me, and as per usual lately, I forgot to write about it. I'll try to get back into the habit of keeping this up to date again. I started doing it then the move happened and I didn't have time and I never got back into the habit… Ah well, time to start again.
Anyway, the Friday party was a success. Lots of relaxation type stuff happening when it was much needed. Some City of Villains being played, some Rock Band and Guitar Hero. And much unhealthy food and drink was consumed.
Which is why I decided that on Saturday, I'd head back to the gym to try to get a habit going again, especially now that I have my iPod Nano. I had a good workout but I realized that I would probably need to get an armband thingy. The Nano has the headphone jack on the bottom and it makes it hard to set it down on machines while I'm exercising.
After the Gym, most of the day was spent up in the office working on my C# programming. I ended up doing a lot of good work on FrostBot, my AI chatbot project. On sunday I actually got it talking…sort of. It needs some improvements, but it actually works!!
Returning to Saturday though, Guitar Hero: Metallica came in through GameFly…a game that I was waiting to play. Wassy and I played some of that in the evening. It's a very very good game. All the songs I played were fun, the atmosphere is awesome and it even has the orchestra in it! All together, I think I'll be buying it. I'll play it enough to make it worth while.
Oh yes, I also started restocking my 20 gallon fish tank on saturday. I went out fish browsing with the intent to research things out, but the fish store had 2 bleeding heart tetras in stock and I had a school that was severely lacking in members, so I bought them. They integrated well with the existing fish and now I have a little school of 4 tetras swimming around in there. I want to get one other school of stuff before I'm finished.
Sunday, aside from finishing off FrostBot, my friends and I wandered around in search of a good place to walk. We ended up stumbling upon a local town park that has a really cool nature trail that isn't too far away. Win! We'll be going back there for walking frequently through the summer I think. It's a nice walk through the woods and it even runs along a creek for a little ways. The creek has a ton of tires and crap it in it…but it's still a creek!
That's about it for the weekend. Like I said, I'll try to write more frequently if I can. Hopefully I can at least get back to at least a couple posts per day.
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The Appreciation Of Fall
Oct 9th 2008
I used to not really enjoy the outdoors when I was a kid. Too hot, too many bugs, too much fresh air. That kinda thing. I was the recluse kid who would rather be inside reading a book or messing around on the computer. But as I've gotten a little older I've started to enjoy just hanging around outside when it's nice out more and more. And also enjoying things like the leaves in fall and the sound of the rain. I think I've become more introspective or something. Enjoying things for what they are and appreciating the little things more.
So it was nice last night taking a little walk after work outside with my friend Wassy who came out for the usual mid-week hanging out. It ended up being a little bit more rainy than it was forecast to be but that was ok. It's part of fall. Around New York state here, fall is a lot like spring…it's hard to tell exactly how long it's going to last, so I'm glad we were able to get out and enjoy a little bit of it.
There will be more fall activities going on this weekend where my friend (Jay and Wassy) and I will be headed out to Trenton Falls (Note, that picture was when the water level was low due to the mismanagement of the regions water supply…it's a long story) to do some walking in the semi wilderness and a picnic lunch after to enjoy the scenic view since the trail will be open. It's only open 4 times a year and I've always wanted to go. It'll be nice to get outside after staying in so much last weekend. And we're supposed to have nice weather too.
Project Weight Loss: Week 13 and 14 + Walking
Apr 21st 2008
It seems I forgot to do a post for last week, so I'm going to be doing a combined post. It's been a bit of a rocky road over the past few weeks due to stress and/or lack of time to exercise. I managed to get off my long standing plateau of just above 250 and now I've traded that in for one just below 250. But I haven't really been exercising as much as I would like to be as of late. Hopefully that will change once school is over and I have some more free time to play with. At least I'm maintaining which is a good thing in my book.
The warmer weather recently has highlighted that I need to go shopping for a couple pairs of shorts. I seem to only have size 42 and size 38, one of which is way too big for me and the other is a little tight right now. I must have either tossed the 40s or my swing in weight totally skipped a size in between a summer.
And because of the warmer weather, I've been walking outside for the past couple of weeks when I have the time to go out and walk. Partially to help build up some endurance for the trip out to Washington DC coming up in a little more than month and partially to get some more different and/or outdoor type activities going to keep things interesting.
This friday though I kinda walked a little longer than I had meant to. There's a couple of different routes I can take around where I live. I usually just do an out and back kinda thing that works out to be about 3 miles total. Friday though I decided to try walking around the loop, as there's a couple of streets that form kinda a ring. I'm in a pretty rural area, so this isn't a small loop. Roughly five to five and a half miles to be exact. So an hour and twenty minutes later, I had almost finished. I stopped into my parents house for some water because I didn't have any cold water at my place and they're just down the road from me and practically collapsed on the living room floor. That's not something I really care to do again in the near future. Maybe once I build up my endurance a bit…
New shoes would be helpful too. My current shoes are a little on the old side and really aren't terribly supportive anymore. So I just purchased a new pair of New Balance MW792's to fix that problem. They should be here Wednesday. Since my size is 13 and I need a wide, it's a little hard to find decent walking shoes in a store, so I usually have to internet order stuff. Darn genetics.
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