Daily Update – August 5, 2022

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.