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Published: July 11th 2022
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Sunday: Started my time in New York off by hiking a portion of the finger lakes trail. The entire trail runs 580 miles end to end but including the entire network is 950 miles all in New York. Of course New York State isn't that wide but the trail is very wiggly. Did a 7 mile hike which was gorgeous and forested. Lots of good scenery and only passed 2 other hikers the entire way! Even on a Sunday afternoon and 75* I thought more people would be outside. What's odd is getting to multiple sections where the forest is clear cut for electrical work. It's very drastic and suddenly sunny- quite the contrast to being in the shaded forest.
Monday: Downtown Ithaca is super cute! Though a lot of shops are closed on Mondays. There were tons of pride flags everywhere since it's June. Lots of colorful murals too. Definitely a refreshing liberal college town feel. Ate diner at Ithaca Ale House and was impressed with their food and drink.
Tuesday: Going right through Dryden is Dryden's "Rail Trail" which is 10 miles of trail that historically was a railroad and now has been turned into multi purpose
recreation. The trail is relatively flat but very scenic with creeks and nature around. Continuing on in 1 direction would actually connect you to a part of the finger lakes trail system. So it's all really nice connected outdoor recreation. The Rail Trail is less than a half mile down the road from where I'm staying so it's really convenient. Check out my photo of the student art too. A section has elementary school art posted along the way. Overall I'm super impressed with the amount of community present in the area.
Thursday: Ithaca has a free summer concert series on Thursday evenings in the downtown "commons". The commons is a 3 block foot traffic only area full of shops and stores downtown. The band described themselves as "Afro-rock" and it was pretty enjoyable. It was lucky too because it had been raining most of the day but the rain stopped just in time for the evening. Someone told me they thought the community in Ithaca is stronger than anywhere else in up-state New York and I can definitely see that being true.
Friday: So Dryden is known for it's diary cows... I still did not expect to
see a free roaming cow directly in front of the dentist office as pictured :-0 Intentionally free roaming and owned by the dentist himself. The cow lives a good life
Saturday: As witnessed with the dentist's cow, Dryden is a dairy town. Dairy day is the 2nd Saturday in June and the largest event for the village of the year. The morning started off with a dairy parade. Yes there were cows in the parade and yes most floats were passing out samples of cheese instead of candy 😊 Copper had high expectations of parades set in Dothan where he got a year's supply of dog treats tossed at him from the floats. Alas, Dryden (as well as Ebensburg) had no dog treats (he did get some cheese). Some of the farm equipment in the parade was impressively big and some of the baby cows were super adorable. Another similarity to Dothan was there were wooden cows local businesses bought and decorated to be in theme with their business. For dairy day (and days leading up to) they put them outside the business so they aren't there year round. They were far less impressive than the dothan peanuts but
still quite amusing. Unfortunately the park hosting the event with dairy day booths and such was crazy crowded. I heard locals saying there hadn't ever been this many people there. So that was a no go for many reasons. They did have the standard guess the weight of the cow, guess how many gallons of milk I produced last year kind of fair fun going on though.
Probably the best thing I have encoutered yet on my travels was Saturday afternoon in Trumansburg called "Porchfest". Porchfest actually originated in Ithaca over a decade ago and is starts just as a bunch of musicians playing on people's porches. Essentially homeowners in the downtown region volunteer their front yard and porch and the porch of the house becomes the stage and people sit in camp chairs or on the grass and sidewalk to listen. There's a set schedule from noon-5 and there were 4-8 performances each hour at various houses throughout the neighborhood. Everything is within a mile of eachother so you can easily walk between them and many had bikes so you could efficiently listen to multiple musicians in a given hour. The music varied but overall was good community
music. Obviously a homy atmosphere with lots of families and dogs all around. There are over 100 porch festivals across the US and Canada but I expect this one was better/larger than most because of it's proximity to the founding city of Ithaca. I will definitely be keeping my eye open for other Pochfests in my future travel. What cooler way to build community than opening your front porch and yard for your neighbors to play music and listen?
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