Escape from Black Friday 2019

Another Black Friday successfully evaded! HOORAY!

I escaped by land this year -- the forecast was for a lovely day but a bit on the breezy side for paddling, so I decided to go for a shorewalk. It ended up being a fun one, making good use of part of the Brooklyn Greenway to change the Sheepshead Bay to Gerritson Creek and back walk I'd set out planning to do into a 6.5 mile one-way walk, beginning at the Sheepshead Bay station on the B and Q line and finishing at Riis Landing in Queens, where I caught the Q35 bus back to my neighborhood. This was really neat!

The walk to Gerritson Creek is a favorite of mine, but I've done it several times and have been thinking it would be fun to mix it up a bit. I think it was the last time I did it I found myself standing at the inlet to the marsh behind Plum Beach, which is a little too deep and wide to cross without hip waders even at low water, looking up at the bridge over the creek, seeing a cyclist or a walker up there, and thinking "OK, another time I will have to figure out how to get up there". Fortunately I remembered that this time! I started out on the beach, then took a well-traveled trail that took me up along the north shore of the marsh. That let me get onto the bike and walking path as I approached the bridge over Gerritson Creek, as I'd figured it would.

There was a great view of Manhattan from up there - I switched out to my zoom lens and was able to grab a nice shot between passing cars (the walkway is on the bay side of the bridge). I followed the Greenway path to Flatbush Avenue and then turned south, getting onto the beach at Dead Horse Bay through the Gateway Marina. I can't remember exactly when I decided to add Queens to the day's itinerary, but it hit me at some point that the timing of this escape was such that catching the 4:30 sunset from the Marine Park Bridge was highly plausible and would make a splendid finish for this new walk.

And that worked out perfectly, even though the Dead Horse Bay section of the walk was at the usual low-water beachcombing amble pace (I don't bring many treasures home these days but I still love looking at things and taking pictures). The sunset was magnificent, I just missed a bus so I walked over to the Riis Landing parking lot for a couple more pictures, then headed for the bus stop, where the next Q35 showed up before too long.

A fine escape, and a walk I'll do again! That's it for the write-up, all photos from here on - click on any photo for a slideshow view. 

Escape from Black Friday 2018 - Follow That Floof!

we're coming, floof!

   O

:D / >
O   
kayak smiley not really appropriate but haven't used in so long!

Another Black Friday succesfully escaped. In Michigan this time! We got an absolutely beautiful Friday morning after a cold and gray but great Thanksgiving with the Michigan clan and also some old friends of the family. My sister Karen had come up from Texas and had found this park built around a complex of ponds earlier in her visit. The ponds began with one that was a local effort and expanded to 5 as part of the Depression-era Civil Works Administration. The ponds, which were terraced and interconnected to each other and the creeks that supplied them, were used to raise fish through the 1960's. My uncle Bill referred to the area as "The Rearing Ponds"; my dad, who's been visiting the area since he was a kid (he and my aunt Kathy used to spend their summers with grandparents who lived nearby, that's where the Michigan connection comes in) actually didn't know about it, so this was a fun discovery.

There weren't a lot of people here on Friday, but it must be busy in the summertime. Fish are not officially being grown here anymore but their descendants are still living here and there are brightly-painted little fishing piers all over.

This wasn't the most ambitious Escape from Black Friday ever, there was an aunt and uncle from Detroit who were arriving at noon and we didn't get a particularly early start, but the trails around the ponds made for a very scenic short ramble for me, Dad, sister Karen, Aunt Lovi, family friend Mike B. (very good photographer who kindly loaned me an SD card when I discovered that the one I'd grabbed as I dashed out the door heading for work with my bag on Wednesday morning was a really old one with my digital picture frame slide-show, so had very little room on it) and of course Belle the dog, who was very happy to be included. My dad had originally suggested a 2-part walk, starting here and then continuing on the fairly new Jonesville rail trail, but there was a lot more here than he'd imagined from my sister's description and we decided to leave the rail trail for another walk.

A couple of notes, then it's all pictures, click on one to get to a slideshow view:

1. The rustic bridge that appears to be made out of wood is actually made out of concrete. I don't know for sure but I was wondering if it was by the same folks who built the charming bridges and benches in McCourtie Park in Somerset Center, which I got to visit last summer. I never shared my photos from there, maybe I'll go back and take a look at them one of these weeks when I'm being too boring to post. In the meantime, McCourtie Park is neat enough to have an entry in the Atlas Obscura!

2. In the picture where Mike is taking a picture of something on the ground - that something is a butterfly (or maybe a colorful moth). Not something you expect to see in Michigan in November, but we saw it fly by and land beside the road and Mike got some good pictures of it. Have to ask him if I can share one! 

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Aunt Lovey, family friend Mike, my dad Bob, my sister Karen, and of course once again featuring my folks' dog Belle as da Floof. 

Escape from Black Friday 2017 - Dead Horse Bay aka "Bottle Beach"

Let's escape down this lacy tunnel of trees! 

Then through the phragmites

and on to the shore - they'll never find us here!

This year's Escape from Black Friday was a pretty laid-back one. The "sample escape route" shown in the last post can be found in Sleeping Giant State Park, a favorite hiking location for TQ and me, but one that's far enough away from NYC that we mostly only go when we're staying in CT (where TQ's mom lives) overnight for a holiday. This year, we made a day trip of our Thanksgiving, returning to Brooklyn after a wonderful dinner with his mom and other family from the area.

We weren't very quick to get going the next day; we briefly mulled over the idea of doing a little exploratory trip for a hike on the Staten Island Greenbelt Trail, a hike that might be quite suitable for one of Sebago's off-season hikes, but with sunset now being at 4:30 in the afternoon (blech), and us not knowing exactly where the trailheads are, we scratched that in favor of just running on out to our favorite old local hiking standby, Floyd Bennett Field, part of the Jamaica Bay unit of the National Park Service's wonderful Gateway Recreation Area.

We usually hit the North Forty Natural Area for short hikes like we had in mind, but I thought it would be a nice switch to do the Dead Horse Bay loop instead. I was guessing that the tide would be fairly close to low and although these days I pretty much have enough old bottles for the available windowsill space (although room can always be made when I find something that's particularly eye-catching, as of course usually happens), I always enjoy beachcombing here, there's just so much weird and interesting stuff to look at if you've got the time, which we did.

Dead Horse Bay got its name from the horse rendering plants that were the main industry in this part of NYC back when the horse was the city's main means of transportation; after a horse carcass was broken down for its useful components, the chopped-up bones were dumped in the bay (sorry to all the horse lovers out there, I'm rather fond of 'em myself and I know that's not a pleasant picture). After the adoption of motor vehicles rendered the rendering industry obsolete, the city began using the area for a landfill; the landfill was capped at some point but the cap broke and now decades of early 20th century garbage steadily leaks out onto the beach.* Bottles, shoes, celluloid toys, knick-knacks, china and pottery, bits of hexagonal tile floors, all sorts of stuff. People love to come here to see what they can find - some people just look, some people bring bags to take treasures home, some people enjoy making little or not-so-little arrangements for others to enjoy.

We've usually come here by kayak, but it was kind of interesting coming by land and walking a bit more of the beach - TQ spotted an eroded bank which was full of the debris that eventually ends up on the beach, and he also spotted a point in the bank where the breach in the landfill just ends and the bank is suddenly clean, pale sand (you can see that in the last photo).

All in all a very pleasant, low-key Escape from Black Friday on a very beautiful day. Click on any photo for a slideshow!

*Atlas Obscura has a good article about Dead Horse Bay - I basically knew the history of the area, other Sebago paddlers have told me the story behind the name and why all the bottles and stuff are there, but I did do a little googling just to make sure I'd heard it right.