Parks

We started 2020 by celebrating winter in Northeast Ohio by attending two ice festivals in January:

• On Monday, January 20, 2020, we attended the North Coast Harbor Ice Fest (#IceFestCLE 2020), which included FREE admission to Great Lakes Science Center and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame & Museum for Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.

• On Sunday, January 26, 2020, we attended the Lake Metroparks Farmpark Ice Festival.

The following are our tweets from these fun events, which include our videos and photos. We share them here to say how we appreciate being able to attend these annual ice festivals.

Weekend Journey: New York & Massachusetts Parks, and Appalachian Long Distance Hikers Association (ALDHA) Gathering

Every year, we go to the Appalachian Long Distance Hikers Association - ALDHA Gathering weekend for workshops on how to backpack the great trails around the world. Normally, we make it a four-day weekend (including traveling), but this year we added some extra days on each end of the trip. These extra days enabled us to see some great New York State Parks with beautiful waterfalls, and more of the park where the Appalachian Trail crosses the highest mountain in Massachusetts.

It was fun to "bookend" our trip to the Appalachian Long Distance Hikers Association - ALDHA Gathering with waterfalls. We write our blog posts to share what we learn about organizations and about places that we enjoy. We hope you will share them with others.

On Sunday, September 29, 2019, our family participated for the fifth consecutive year in Euclid Beach Park Now's 15th Annual Remembering the Sights & Sounds of Euclid Beach Park event. This was a special year for us and for this Cleveland tradition for three reasons:

• For the amusement park, it represented 50 years of memories.

• For our family, it represented a new role for Julie and for our son, Kevin.

• For the Cleveland Metroparks, it represented fulfillment of a plan to honor Cleveland's history while better serving Cleveland's Collinwood community.

We write our blog posts as our way to thank the great organizations in Cleveland and Akron that bring joy to our lives. If you read our posts, you will see that we are very fortunate!

What a day! We attended Cleveland's second Rails-to-Trails Conservancy Opening Day for Trails - Cleveland on Saturday, April 13, 2019, at Cleveland Metroparks' Merwin's Wharf. We knew to expect a great event, but the very large participation of Clevelanders interested in learning about Cleveland's urban trails was beyond what we had expected.

I first learned about the Cleveland Metroparks Adventure University a year ago. It looked like somethng I would really enjoy, but we were dealing with a family emergency that kept me from attending the Spring of 2018. When I saw on Twitter that the third annual Cleveland Metroparks Adventure University & Gear Swap would be taking place at Baldwin Wallace University on Saturday, March 23, 2019, I was doubly excited to attend. First, I saw that they had exciting organizations participating, and workshops planned in areas that greatly interested me. Secondly, my annual case of "Springer Fever" had set in, and I was ready to learn from presenters about my future adventures. 

On June 9, 2018, we had a great day that we want to share with you. This blog post includes 152 tweets from before and during the Cleveland Museum of Art's Parade the Circle, and from our evening activities on the Cleveland Metroparks' waterfront. Writing this post reminds us of the fun we had, and we hope it encourages others to explore these and related activities in the future.

We were able to attend the Parade the Circle together again in Cleveland's University Circle, and wanted to share our experience and photos from our @sos_jr tweets and retweets. If you never attended Parade the Circle, it is a must-attend Cleveland event!

We started off June 2018 with some great activities and music. We often go to the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Metroparks, and we wanted to share in this blog post some of the unique things we did on June 1 and June 2, 2018.

What we needed was a simple day to get away -- thank you, Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, and the Cleveland Zoological Society, for providing the perfect venue.

Earlier in the month, we had learned from tweets by Etsuko Dunham, Danielle Garbo, and Kelly Manderfield about some incredibly beautiful Japanese cherry tree blossoms in the Cleveland Metroparks' Brookside Reservation, which is very near the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo.

Cleveland Museum of Natural History has nature hikes at Mentor Marsh. We learned that the Museum's Natural Areas Department has over 9,400 acres of land on 56 natural areas.

When Julie and I heard about the May 6, 2018, Bald Eagle Fest at Mentor Marsh, we were excited to check it out!

My family participated in a great day of activities planned by the new REI Cleveland store ahead of the grand opening of their Beachwood location.

• Backpacking 101
• Backcountry cooking
• Essential knot tying
• Smartphone photography for the outdoors
• Bluegrass fireside concert

We attended a day of activities at Holden Arboretum, so in addtion to the special activities planned by REI Cleveland, we also explored the Murch Canopy Walk and the Kalberer Emergent Tower.