Tye Lake in the morning

The original yesterday was to spend a half hour on the elliptical machine at the Monroe YMCA and then walk three laps around Tye Lake. Just for a little variety. As luck would have it, this is the Monroe Y's shutdown week, where they close up for a week to perform maintenance, upgrade equipment and generally spiff the place up a bit. The first hint was the near complete lack of vehicles in the parking lot...this gym is usually packed, even at 7 am on Saturday..

Still, doing one additional lap around the lake on a gorgeous Summer morning wasn't so bad.

I was feeling pretty studly to be out walking 6 miles early on the weekend until I asked this guy running laps around the lake how much his pack weighed and he said 70 pounds. He was there when I got to the lake and still there when I left.

Some more pictures of the lake and the area around the walking path.

This was sad...it looks like somebody passed away here pretty recently. 

Fitbit Challenge Walk Pictures 4 (Sammamish River Trail)

I felt like walking in a new place yesterday, so after work I made my way over to a Sammamish River Trail parking lot in Woodinville. On the way over, the precipitation which the Puget Sound region is famous for was falling vigorously from the sky and I hadn't brought any more rain compensating gear than my Seattle Sombrero(*). So I stopped at the YMCA and worked the elliptical machine for a half hour, giving the rain a chance to abate before going to the trail.

The Sammamish River Trail is a paved, multipurpose trail that winds its way from Bothell all the way to Redmond's Marymoor Park. While it is heavily infested with a particularly earnest and grim species of bicyclist, it does include some neat views of Woodinville's vineyards. It is sort of like a long narrow, paved version of an Olmstead park. However, the stretch from Bothell to Woodinville travels alongside several freeways, so instead I headed in the direction of Marymoor park.

Didn't go this way:

 Environmental standards may not be perfect in Washington state. But they try. And we never have rivers catching fire!

This was a cool two sided statue that was situated right at the Woodinville trailhead, with one side a crescent moon and the other a leaping salmon. Very creative capture of the complexity and beauty of the natural world!

The rain had been reduced to a light mist by the time I started walking the trail and it was actually very pleasant. Along the way it picked up, here and there, but never reached the point where I had to worry about water damage to my cell phone or wallet. The overcast was a typical Seattle Augtober overcast, which is actually kind of cozy.


I was surprised to find that there's an adventure course behind the Redhook Brewery. What could be more fun in than climbing ropes with coworkers/friends and then going inside for an icy cold beer? That would be the best!

 I almost captured a better flying creature photo than these sculptures of dragonflies by an overpass. At one point, I was walking along and a heron just flew in and landed about a hundred feet up the trail. I was getting my camera out to capture a photo of him when a Lance Armstrong bicyclist wannabe came barreling through and the heron flew off. Brilliant.

(Bonus pictures: captured these photos tonight on the Centennial Trail between Lake Stevens and Lake Cassidy)

Fitbit Challenge Walk Pictures 3 (Snohomish)

Aside from the health benefits of walking, another nice thing about it is that it's done at a pace where you have time to pause and look at details, to process things you see and notice things that are interesting. For instance, I was walking past the police station and noticed a phone booth out in front of it. I've probably driven by it a hundred times but at a walking pace, I had time to think about how rarely you see phone booths these days. Now I'm wondering if somebody in the police station is a mild mannered officer named Clark Kent...

The picture above is an early morning Sunday shot from the Snohomish Bakery.

Wait, my town has a BOOKSTORE?! When did that happen? And it looks like a pretty cool one, too.
OK, I'm joking now: Uppercase Bookshopis a fantastic shop that is well-loved in our community.

The Snohomish River ambles through town...

Note that the river is normally10-15 feet below the path...and those tick marks on the building on the left show levels the water has reached in various floods.

"The Bridges of Snohomish County"

The pictures below make me wonder if there are beavers in the town that I just haven't seen...

Fitbit Challenge Walk Pictures 2 (Little Si and North Bend)

Last weekend, we did some of our walking by hiking up Little Si, a small local mountain near North Bend that's a fun little hike. About a 5 mile round trip with an elevation gain of a bit over 1500 feet.

A commemorative marker along the way.

A few shots captured along the way (all I had along was a cell phone, unfortunately).

After the hike, we stopped at Twede's Cafe for a bit of refueling.

Fitbit Challenge Walk Pictures 1 (Back East)

As luck would have it, the arrival of our fitbit devices at work came just a couple days before I was to travel East for a visit back to Niagara Falls and Buffalo, NY. The main purpose of the trip was to visit family and friends who I hadn't seen in a few years, so I was worried about fitting in the time for daily exercise walks. I needn't have worried...

The trip started excitingly enough at Seatac airport. Since I have a policy of demanding to opt out instead of walking through airport RAPISCANCER machines, the TSA (Transportation Stazi Administration) conducted their usual "4th amendment free zone" patdown and then freaked when it turned out there was gunpowder residue on my backpack (from having used it as a range bag previously). In the end, the TSA cretin and his supervisor reached the brilliant conclusion that I was not the bleeding edge of a hitherto unknown terrorist organization of 50-something computer programmers. If this is happening thousands of times across America daily, it's obvious that sequester budget cuts have NOT gone deep enough!

Enough ranting...during the flight back to New York state I had a 3 hour stopover in Chicago's O'Hare Airport and managed to do some of my daily walking by walking laps around this moving walkway.

Apatosaurus? Bah! You'll always be brontosaurus to me.

Most of my visit home was spent visiting family in Niagara Falls. An especially cool bit was that my mom is also a walker and so we did walks around Goat Island together every day that I was home. Goat Island is about 1.4 miles around, so a couple laps of it got me through a good sized chunk of the days step goal.

It's funny the way that we forget how amazing things in our past were. When I was growing up in Niagara Falls, I didn't think anything about what spectacular luck it was that I could just walk here anytime I wanted. Certainly some of the best memories of my youth are of times spent here by these stunningly powerful waters rushing to plummet over the cataract...time spent bicycling or walking or in the company of a lovely woman. But being back for a visit brought it all back...

One of the other nice things about being back in Niagara Falls is that the Canadian border is also right there. My mom and I also took the opportunity to drive across and see Niagara-on-the-Lake, an especially British-flavored town just across the Niagara Gorge from New York where runs into Lake Ontario.

Battles in the War of 1812 between the US and Canada were fought in this area, two centuries earlier. Niagara-on-the-Lake was burned to the ground (and Buffalo was razed also, in retaliation)...
 

On the way back from Niagara-on-the-Lake, we stopped to look at Brock's Monument, in Queenston Heights. This second monument to Major-General Sir Isaac Brock (whose leadership repulsed an invading US militia...an early lesson in why Americans visiting Canada should BE POLITE) was damaged by lightning strikes in 1929.

During my visit to NY, I also spent some time in Buffalo, visiting with a good friend and exploring. These two photos were taken in the arty Allentown district.

Like the Niagara Falls Reservation, Delaware Park is the result of a brilliant parks system design by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, When I lived in Buffalo, this was another area that I was drawn to and which provided priceless opportunities for recreation in the heart of a busy city. Nestled in one corner of Delaware Park is the Buffalo History Museum, which inhabits the one remaining building from the 1901 Pan American Exposition.The exhibits include illustrations of items invented or manufactured in Buffalo, along with historical artifacts from the city's long and vibrant history.

On the other hand, maybe Buffalo would have a more robust economy now if they had thought through their "local products" a little more thoroughly!

These two photos were taken while walking around the Niagara Falls Public Library, a FANTASTIC resource when I was going to school there.

One photo that I took walking through The Book Corner, a fantastic local bookstore dating back to 1927.