A Child Of Atom

I just got back to the city from my fabulous weekend in the mountains! I'm a little tuckered, but boy am I happy. It was a great weekend.

Kid Flash and I decided to visit Lake Taghkanic State Park, which is in upstate NY. Find the area on a map where the Connecticut and Massachusetts borders meet the NY border and trace your finger towards the left. You'll Taconic State Park immediately, but keep going and you'll see Lake Taghanik. It's a small state park, but it is incredibly well equipped. They have four or five levels of camping, regular ground camping, RV camping, camping platforms, cabins, and cottages. The cottages have private showers where the cabins just have toilets, and a shared shower block, but they are more than adequate.

We arrived Friday afternoon about 3 and found our very cute and quaint little cabin. It has two bedrooms with double beds, (we chose this camp ground because it had double beds, all the others had either twins or bunks.) a living room with a fireplace, a kitchen and a small screened porch. It looked like it had been refurbished over the winter, the floors were freshly polished and it was immaculate. Since the cabins just started season rentals a few weeks ago we very well could have been the first people there this season.

After checking out the cabins we set out on a quest for food for the weekend. KF is vegetarian so I hadn't wanted to do the food shopping without him. It's been a long time since I cooked vegetarian meals for myself, so I wanted the input. It took quite a bit of questing to find a grocery store, but with the help of some locals we finally found an IGA and put together the necessities for the weekend. I won't bore you with the menus but we had some really good meals, included a pasta with pesto and fiddleheads, (that's what's cooking in the pan in the pic) and this eggplant dish, that I HIGHLY recommend. We also picked up some of those compressed wood fireplace logs because it was a little cold and we were planning to make good use of the fireplace that the cabin provided. I am SO glad we did.

The temps on Friday night got down pretty low, but that's just good weather for snugglin' so I didn't complain. The weather said that we were supposed to have rain over the weekend and temps in the 50's so we were expecting much, frankly.

Saturday we spent most of the day hiking around the lake that gives the park it's name. The park had been created and laid out as part of the CCC in the 30's, and a lot of the structures are original to that era. Included in that is a 40' water tower where we found this VERY large bird nesting. If anyone reading this could help ID this bird we'd appreciate it. I know it's a lousy picture and we never saw the full bird, but what we saw was black, except for a white area underneath her bill. To give you a sense of scale the nest she's resting in here is between 4 and 5' in diameter. It was a HUGE nest.

We also did a bit of geocaching, finding the one cache that was in the park. It did end up raining a bit, but it was pretty much just a mist, and the trees on the hiking trail protected us from most of us.

The next day started off with MUCH more rain. We were woken up by driving rain, and figured that any further hiking or fun in the area was probably going to be out. I had one more geocache in the area that I wanted to hit, and we had planned on going over to another state park and doing a bit more hiking. Luckily by the time we dragged ourselves out of bed the rain had stopped and the sun was out. We decided to hit the cache at least, and see how the day progressed. First we had lunch at a classic silver American diner. By the time we were finished there the sun had dried most everything out. The cache was a bust, we never could find it unfortunately, (there's KF standing in the middle of a stream trying to get a clear read out of my GPS unit).


To wrap things up we hit Taconic State park, and hiked up to the Bash Bish Falls (that's them in the pic), and to Sunset Rock, where you are supposed to be able to see all three of the local states from above.

All in all a FABULOUS weekend and a really great start to my summer season. I think it is really going to be a great year if this is any indication. Next up on the agenda is Prague, then probably a bit more camping. I can't wait!!