Heiberg Forest - Upper Trail

What a great day today was.  Shannon had the day off and we decided to take advantage of it.

After a few hours puttering around the house, we packed up Chinook and headed out to Heiberg Memorial Forest (near Tully).  I had been there once before with Chinook, and then again to show Shannon the view from one of the outlooks.  Today, however, we decided to do a little hiking.

The autumn colors are starting to bloom and both the Upper Trail and Nature Trails were absolutely beautiful.  You can see more details of the hike on my Trails, Tails and Tents blog.  We came across a lot of mushrooms along the Nature Trail.  A few of those pictures are below.

Heiberg Nature Trail - Mushrooms 1

Heiberg Forest - Mushrooms 2

Along the Nature Trail, there were three different geocaches.  We were unsuccessful finding the first one.  We made it to the location, but just couldn’t find the cache.  The second cache we totally forget about as I was absorbed with taking photos along the trail and with reading the various postings along the path.  We were also keeping our eyes open for “Peter” a beagle that was lost along the trail a day or two earlier.  The owners, who we saw along the upper trail and driving up and down the road, told us about the situation and gave us their number in case we should come across him.  However, we did manage to find the third cache toward the end of the trail.

GCHTAX - N42 46.585 W76 05.249

Normally, we don’t take anything from the caches when we find them.  This particular cache, however, had a unique travel bug — a “Wine Cork Travel Bug”.

Wine Cork Travel Bug #2

In October, Shannon and I will be joining Steven, Nancy and Lori for an outing at Letchworth State Park.  I’m hoping that we can break out a couple of bottles of Buttwood Blush (to add the cork to the collection) and then send the bug along the way in the Rochester area.

After dropping Chinook off at the house, Shannon and I changed and then headed to Columbus Circle for the Italian Festival.  Our timing couldn’t have been better.  We got a good parking spot and the lines weren’t bad at all.  The smell of the food was overpowering.

After a once-around, I decided on a steak and lobster sandwich and some grilled scallops.  Shannon went with lobster ravioli in a vodka sauce.  For dessert, we went with eclairs and taramansue (spelling?). Ummmm ….  Not a bad day at all.

As we headed back to the car, the parking lots had filled and people started to fill in.  Like I said, our timing was great.  If the rest of the weekend follows suite — Sono un uomo fortunato!

Tags: Food

This entry was posted on Friday, September 18th, 2009 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Gary's Picks, Geocaches, Parks & Recreation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.