We visited the Winn Preserve on a perfect day. The temperature was in the mid-60s, the air was crisp, the sun was shining, and the leaves were changing color all around us. It was also the first time our son put his boots on the ground and “hiked” on the trail with us! Okay, so he didn’t hike the whole thing, but he did walk a stretch of the trail and loved every second!
We parked our car once the road got too rough to drive on, and walked the rest of the way. The road wound past bee boxes, two beaches, with the blue Aegean flanking your right field of vision the entire way. The road turned around a bend and that was when we saw it. The Drakano Tower stood out starkly against the bright blue sky. We finally made it!
The Keleher Preserve is a conservation area in the town of New Scotland that is managed by the Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy. This is a larger preserve, with over 440 acres and offers miles of hiking trails with some overlooks of the city of Albany. We got a chance to hike around this gorgeous spot to take in the final days of summer. We even spied some leaves already starting to change color on us!
There are several little corners in Europe where myth and reality are so intertwined that the lines between them are wonderfully blurred. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, is one such place. Here dragons (or rather, the Ljubljana Dragon) play into history as much as any other sobering realities. The result is a magical, fantastical, and charming place.
I’ve been hearing about Letchworth State Park for years now. “It’s the Grand Canyon of the East,” my husband has said to me on numerous occasions. Though I always kept it in mind, my need to visit this state park was cemented in 2015 when it was voted by USA Today readers as THE best state park in the United States. For Labor Day weekend, we traveled to western New York and finally decided to make a day at Letchworth. I must say, it lived up to all the hype!
The Adirondacks are beautiful. They are immense, tall, rugged, and powerful. It had been several years since my last Adirondacks hike, when we decided to hike up to Cascade Mountain, I was thrilled. This provides a short day hike to a summit with a glorious 360 degree view of the Adirondack Mountains.
Scotland is, without a doubt, one of my favorite places in the world. There is something incredibly wonderful and comfy about the entire country. To me, it feels like home. I will have to talk about so many of the lovely spots that I had the chance to visit while doing research for my masters thesis, but today, I will talk about just one amazing place. The Ring of Brodgar in the Orkney Islands.
The journey up to North Point is a beautiful one. We decided to hike to this overlook with our one year old son and had a wonderful time! With multiple views along the way, the trail gently slopes up, giving you a lot of level areas and allowing you to catch your breath as you make your way to the top. This was our first real hike since our son was born, and it was the best way to get ourselves back into hiking shape!
I have always thought that sunrises were more magical than sunsets. Don’t get me wrong, sunsets are beautiful. I just find sunrises even more so. Sunrises give me an optimism and hopefulness that I don’t find anywhere else. They offer the promise of a new day and all the endless possibilities that accompany it. Sunrises on vacation, when you know that you don’t have to go to work, are the best.
That’s why when we visited Acadia National Park, we knew that we had to see the sunrise from Cadillac Mountain, the highest point on all the east coast United States.
The Lisha Kill Preserve is a beautiful place, and echoes the feeling I had while traipsing though the Black Forest in Germany. The forests here consist of tall, dark trees and soft pine needles trail riddled with roots to walk on. It’s simply magical.