I love a good adventure. And adventure can mean so many different things. Usually for me an adventure means getting outdoors in some way.
A friend and I were planning to go for a nice long hike. Hopefully hitting some new to us trails. But, things didn’t go as expected.
The morning of our planned adventure it was a snow storm. We couldn’t really find the trail parking spot indicated on the map due to the snow. It didn’t seem safe to just park on the side of the road due to the snow and plows.
We deiced to regroup at a location where we were both at least a little familiar with. And we knew that there would be a safe place to park. So we planned to start farther away from the trail head and just hike up the road a bit farther to get to where we wanted to start.
After a while of being on the roadside. And that resulting in us repeatedly getting splattered with snow and slush by cars passing by despite most of their best efforts to give us space, we decided to get off the roadway. We took a trail we were familiar with, thinking it would eventually get us close to the trail we wanted to hike.
We were wrong. We ended up even farther from the trail I had intended us to hike. Fortunately it did take us to the road bypass used during hunting season closures. So we were able to hike the bypass back to a section of trail I had wanted to hike anyway. Then we did that section backwards towards where we ended up starting out from. And then we got on another section of trail that would take us back to hour cars.
A hike that was supposed to be an out and back on mostly forested trails on The Finger Lakes Trail ended up being a figure 8 type route that was 10 miles long. Most of this hike probably ended up being along roadsides, and a smaller portion of it on rail trail type trials. The smallest portion of the hike was a few miles in some nice woodland trails on the FLT as originally planed.
This wasn’t the adventure I had planned but in a way it was an even better adventure because it was completely unexpected and unplanned. But it was still a completely enjoyable day on my feet experiencing nature and talking with a friend.
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