Good morning! Happy Saturday. First really nice day of my vacation! I guess time flies when you are having fun or its cloudy and dreary. Four weeks to the Sunset Before 7:30 PM 🌆. Mostly sunny and 67 degrees at the Finger Lakes National Forest. There is a west breeze at 6 mph. 🍃. The dew point is 64 degrees.

Today represents the kind of weather I wish I had for my whole vacation, 😎 with much desired blue skies. Absolutely beautiful morning. Despite the clouds all week and a few rain showers, for the most part its been a fairly dry week, the trails aren’t all saturated and the campsite is not flooded unlike last year.🌻 I love the small towns, camping in the wilderness, and just hanging out and relaxing. But the way I look at it, there is always next year, although I do plan to get out camping again later in the summer and obviously in the fall, the capstone being my big November trip to Western New York, hunting and enjoying the scenery and those amazing November days.🍂 Some day I’ll move back to a small town, have an off grid house with lots of land, and have lots of fires.

After thinking about it for a while, I decided to head north to Seneca Falls to paddle the Seneca River past Montezuma. 🚣If I put in at the boat launch across from the main entrance to Montezuma there is 5 plus miles each way of flat water paddling without locks, passing the preserve. There wasn’t a that much traffic on the canal last Saturday but lots of birds and wildlife to observe.🐥 About 35 miles from camp. I was going to do Seneca Lake in Watkins Glen but with construction and the race going on, I decided against that. Lamoka Lake is about the same distance but again I’d have to deal with race traffic and I don’t want to do that.

Later on this afternoon I am going to go back to Taughannock State Park for another swim in Cayuga Lake, 🏊 then maybe grab a bite somewhere and then at dusk hike the Interlaken Trail out into one of the pastures to watch the sunset over Seneca Lake🌇 and maybe get some nice cow pictures. 🐄 Seems like a fitting end to vacation. Tomorrow it’s Enfield Glen hike early then a swim mid day then heading home. 🏠

Today will have a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms after 1pm. Mostly sunny 🌞 , with a high of 80 degrees at 3pm. Typical for today. Maximum dew point of 65 at 8am. Northwest wind 5 to 7 mph. Chance of precipitation is 20%. A year ago, we had partly cloudy skies. It was sticky. The high last year was 84 degrees. The record high of 98 was set in 1955.

The sun will set at 8:22 pm with dusk around 8:54 pm, which is one minute and 15 seconds earlier than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for mostly clear skies and 76 degrees. The dew point will be 66 degrees. There will be a calm wind. Today will have 14 hours and 19 minutes of daytime, an increase of 2 minutes and 17 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be mostly clear 🌞 , with a low of 67 degrees at 3am. Five degrees above normal. Maximum dew point of 66 at 8pm. Calm wind. In 2017, we had mostly cloudy skies. It was sticky. It got down to 62 degrees. The record low of 43 occurred back in 1972.

Yesterday I went down to the Watkins Glen Public Library and started my new Facebook page. It’s still a work in progress but the automated blog posts are starting to show up there. Big announcement about that next week. 🏊 Then I hiked through the Watkins Glen Gorge, went for a quick swim at the pool then stopped at Walmart for paper towels and some extra clothes. Heated up canned chill 🍛 with corn chips ($1 at Walmart for race weekend), then had a little fire and sat in the hammock for a while retiring to bed by ten, as was dog tired. 🐶

Looking ahead, there are 4 weeks until Sunset Before 7:30 PM in Albany 🌆 when the sun will be setting at 7:40 pm with dusk at 8:09 pm in the Finger Lakes. On that day in 2017, we had mostly cloudy skies and temperatures between 66 and 45 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 77 degrees. We hit a record high of 96 back in 1953.