Good morning! Happy Friday. 😲

How fast summer vacation comes and goes. Some of it is the more relaxed pace this year. Some of it just is time is going by faster as I get older.

Partly cloudy and 72 degrees at the Finger Lakes National Forest. ⛅ Calm wind. The dew point is 69 degrees. The skies will clear around 9 am.

So yesterday I decided to head to Watkins Glen before the thunderstorms came. ⛈ They arrived, just a few crackles of thunder and the pool was closed. Looked at the radar, the only a few small thunder cells, figured they’d pass by shortly.

Decided in the meantime to hike the Finger Lakes Trail. ☔ The thunder and rain picked up and I hurried to an old CCC built picnic pavilion. Pretty crazy thunderstorm that kind of popped out from nowhere though this 90 year old picnic pavilion is a very substantial structure, super heavy built out of massive timber beams.

With the rain and thunderstorms here never got much above eighty. 🌡️But based on the frying pan on the table we got half and inch of rain after about 3 hours of rain and thunder this afternoon. Spent like two of them hiding out in the Punch Bowl Shelter on the Finger Lakes Trail. It was wet for a while, ended up completely soaked walking back after two hours of sheltering from the loud, repeated cracks of thunder and driving rain. Hiked through the gorge there after 🚶 and it was fairly empty but damp.

I wanted to go to the pool 🏊‍♂️ but by 5 pm it’s opening seemed unlikely. I had some work stuff to do and I wanted to figure out the plotKML library so I went down to the Watkins Glen library. 📊 I hung out there until about ten minutes before closing and then decided to skip ice cream and head back to camp. ⛺

This morning I’m thinking about bringing my kayak 🛶 down to Watkins Glen and doing some paddling on Seneca Lake. I’ve noticed in the morning it’s often the calmest, if not I can explore the Bad Indian Swamp with the kayak. I’ll probably leave it on my truck for the remainder of the week, paddling Taughannock and Cayuga Lake tomorrow. 🏊‍♂️ Hope to get some swimming in later at the state park, depends on how stormy it gets later.