It’s that time of year again when we hit the road on a new adventure. This year, we’re road tripping to Massachusetts. We’ll take two days to get there and three days to get back, leaving us with 4 full days in the Boston area.
HARRISON LAKE STATE PARK
We hit the road in Michigan City, IN early this morning, despite a short night sleep and needed a little extra caffeine boost to get us going. If you’ve followed my other road trips, you know that I prefer stretching my legs at points of interest rather than at roadside rest stops. Our first leg stretch of a long travel day was at Harrison Lake State Park, just off the turnpike in Ohio. All state parks in Ohio (and many throughout the US) are free to enter, so they make a great place to get out and take in some natural views while stretching those leg muscles. Harrison Lake SP was a perfect place for just that. We took a little walk, looked at the lake, and got back on the road within 30 minutes.
PRESQUE ISLE STATE PARK
By the time we hit our next leg stretch spot, we were out of Ohio and into Pennsylvania. Presque Isle State Park is it’s own island off the coast of Erie, PA and was an opportunity for us to get up close and personal with Lake Erie. During our 2018 Road Trip, we visited three of the five Great Lakes and we’ll get to the other two on this trip, starting today. Presque Isle SP is also free to enter, but would be quite a lovely place to rent a bike for an afternoon. It was a blustery and chilly day for August, so we drove around the whole park, but didn’t spend a lot of time actually on the beach. Just as well, because we only had 1/2 hour scheduled before we needed to get back on the road in order to stick to our schedule.
NIAGARA FALLS STATE PARK
Our final destination of the evening was Niagara Falls State Park in New York. This has been something I’ve always wanted to see, but my fiancé already saw it 20+ years ago, so I didn’t think it would make it on our agenda. Fortunately, it is almost exactly halfway between our home and Boston, so it was a logical place to spend our first night. We decided to make it just an hour visit this trip and come back for a more extended visit on the Canadian side at another time. The Falls are beautiful and we arrived about an hour before sunset, so the sky had that lovely afternoon glow… perfect for pictures! An hour was enough time to visit both falls and take, according to my fiancé, “a million pictures” at each. Make sure to accompany that previous sentence with an overly emphasized eye roll for the proper effect. Obviously we both enjoy different aspects of our journeys together and that is ok.
HARD ROCK CAFE NIAGARA FALLS
My fiancé collects Hard Rock shot glasses, as you m
ay remember from an earlier post. He already has one from his last visit to Niagara Falls, but we visited the Hard Rock Cafe in Niagara Falls anyway because we were starving and he wasn’t in the mood for Indian food, which is in abundance around the Falls.
We finished off the night by finding a cheap Budget Inn outside Buffalo to crash at for the evening. It was cheap, clean and the staff was nice. It wasn’t somewhere I’d make a point to revisit, but it suited it’s purpose and I wouldn’t be sad to find myself spending a night there again on a future road trip. They also had really strong coffee in the morning, which I greatly appreciate.
through the park just to get to our hiking location. This really is a huge state park! The Presque Isle hike is not for the hiking novice and I recommend you taking hiking sticks if you have them. There are times when the “path” really doesn’t exist and you are climbing loose rocks, along a ridge, next to a steep drop, scampering up tree root “stairs” like some kind of mountain goat, or carefully making your way across the wiggly rocks scattered across the front of a waterfall. The only way you know you’re still on the “trail” sometimes is to look for the trees with the blue dots on them and keep moving towards the next one. I brought along my really nice set of two hiking sticks, so we split them up and each used one. If you can manage it though, the hike offers a lot of diversity and is well worth the effort. We got to see the waterfalls along the river, but also spent some time rock hunting along the shore of Lake Superior. We got a toe in, but not much more, because Lake Superior is a VERY cold lake, even in the end of July.
Live The Bucket 