March Vacation, Part One

Carol and I headed south for a week's vacation that combined family visits in Connecticut and New Jersey with several days of hiking and geocaching in New York's Catskill Mountains. We covered a lot of ground on this trip! 

Our first stop was a visit with my brother Drew and his wife Kate at their Connecticut home, with an evening tour of walking trails that Drew maintains in conservation land behind their house. The next day we made a convoluted journey to New Jersey with stops for two notable geocaches on Carol's bucket list. First up was the oldest geocache in Connecticut, dating back to the year 2000. On a 70-degree day we found it after a short walk on the trails of the Bartlett Arboretum in Stamford. This would be a marvelous place to visit during the blooming season. With this find, Carol has now logged the oldest geocache in each of the six New England states.

A winding driving route then took us to the Turkey Mountain Nature Preserve near Yorktown Heights, NY. We followed the trail partway up the mountain, where, after a fairly lengthy off-trail search, we found a geocache placed in a stone wall in the month of November 2000. With this find, Carol needs only four months to complete the Jasmer Challenge - "a challenge to find at least one cache hidden in every month since the first cache was hidden in May 2000."

While Carol headed back down the trail to look for more geocaches, I continued up the mountain to check out views promised by a descending hiker. Though only 831 feet high, Turkey Mountain is rugged and ledgy.

At the top there are views of the Manhattan skyline (on the left).....

...and the Croton Resevoir.

 

Two hikers enjoy the views from the open summit ledges.

I made a loop hike following the trail north along the ridgecrest through open woods, followed by an angling descent back to the south and the trailhead. A nice 2.2 mile hike.

The next morning we walked through a geocaching "adventure lab" in the Mount Tabor, NJ historic district, featuring a number of Victorian cottages. A fascinating place. Then we were off to an entertaining baby shower for my nephew Mike and his wife, Joy, followed by a birthday party for my brother-in-law, Geo.

 

 

We had been pondering a stay in the Catskills on the way back to NH, but the weather forecasts looked less than promising. It was looking better the day before we left NJ, so we made a last-minute decision to go for it, and booked a condo in Windham, NY.

After checking out of our hotel in NJ, we went on a trip down my memory lane, heading a half-hour south to the area where I grew up. We stopped at Union County's Watchung Reservation, a 2,000-acre preserve in the Watchung Mountains tucked in between Interstate 78 and old US Route 22. I spent much time here outdoors as a youth. We took a two-mile hike with some geocaching, enjoying a scenic walk along the shore of Lake Surprise.

Easy walkin' on a sunny, balmy late winter day.

We could get used to this.

Near the Trailside Nature & Science Center are a Sensory Friendly Trail and a short self-guided Geology Trail. There is also a 6-mile History Trail that looks quite interesting. The reservation was busy on our Sunday afternoon visit - a great resource for residents of north-central NJ.

From Watchung Reservation we drove to my hometown of North Plainfield, which I had not been to since the 1970s. I paid a brief visit to a tiny green oasis my childhood friends and I called "The Island," where we spent many happy hours. 

Green Brook borders "The Island," and forms the boundary between North Plainfield and the city of Plainfield. It was quite polluted in those days, but is looking better now.

The old homestead was looking pretty good after a half-century. From here we went on to the Catskills, the mountains of my youth, where my Boy Scout troop undertook several backpacking trips in the late 1960s.