Cherry Tree

The unusually warm weather on Saturday, April 4, 2026, brought huge crowds out to the annual Sakura Festival in Akron, Ohio. This was Stuart's second time attending the Festival, but it was a first-time visit for Julie and our son, Kevin. The Festival was hosted by the Downtown Akron Partnership.

Sakura is the Japanese word for cherry blossoms. The Japanese cherry blossom trees, planted by the Japanese Association of Northeast Ohio (JANO) along the canal in downtown Akron, were beautifully in bloom. The crowds enjoyed the delicate, pink blossoms as they walked along the canal and patronized the many vendors who participated. There were crafts, and performances by a drumming group and dancers, as well as opportunities to learn about Japanese culture, including a traditional tea ceremony.

Thank you for reading our blog post, and we hope you will share it with others so they can learn about this fun Akron event and scenic trail.

Welcome to the 2024 Trail Challenge, a guest led program where you are challenged to complete 10 trails in 10 different Cleveland Metroparks reservations on your own in 2024! Explore new trails, move to better health, discover the wonders of nature, and earn a prize.

This Cleveland Metroparks Trail Challenge 2024 blog post covers the trails I biked (November 3rd and November 9th), and hiked (December 7th through December 23rd). I had already "met the challenge" back in February, but decided to end the year by completing the rest of the land-based trails. This blog post is a continuation of my February 15, 2024, blog post.

Between my Trail Challenge week in February 2024, and my 12 trails in November and December, I have completed every single land-based trail listed for the Cleveland Metroparks Trail Challenge 2024!!! That is a total of 27 trails (15 in Feb + 12 in Nov/Dec = 27 trails) in all 18 of the Cleveland Metroparks reservations listed for the 2024 challenge! (There were an additional four water routes listes that I did not do.)

I updated the image from February 2024 with the additional dates of the reservations that I biked (blue) in November and hiked (red) in December.

I hope this blog post encourages you to get out on our local park trails to do the Trail Challenge in 2025! Please go out and explore our great, award-winning Cleveland Metroparks!

2020 has been different, with many of the venues we would normally visit closed due to the coronavirus crisis.

We were very pleased when the Cleveland Metroparks announced in May 2020 that they would be offering their fourth annual Trail Challenge, which included 25 trails. In August 2020, we learned that the park updated the list to include 35 trails!

The increase in the number of trails did not change the requirements for receiving the 2020 Challenge prizes . . .

• Complete 10 trails to  earn a 2020 Trail Challenge sticker

• Complete 20 trails to earn a 2020 Trail Challenge mug

. . . but we enjoy a challenge (and enjoy hiking/biking trails), and decided to do more than the minimum. This blog post shares our journey on all but one of the remaining land-based trails. See Stuart's 2020 Trail Challenge tracker sheet with notes on the 33 trails.

Looking for humor and creativity on the Twitterverse, and visiting parks while social distancing is what my life mainly consists of currently. There is also a lot of sadness about plans being canceled, but my family has been fortunate to have had no illness or death. I try to support those that I see online that are making a difference in our community.

While no day of COVID-19 social distancing is the same, the typical day often contains the following elements: 

• Absolutely no consistency in mornings

• Forenoon - Twitter online distractions

• 2:00 pm coronavirus #InThisTogetherOhio updates from Ohio Governor Mike DeWine

• Afternoon walk in local parks to help deal with coronavirus-related stress

• Evenings are spent watching online movies

In this blog post, I share my experience visiting local parks, and my online life during these coronavirus crisis times.

As we have done the past four years, we have created this #NewYearsEve and #NewYearsDay 2019 #ThankYou blog post to review some of the fun things we did in 2018. We enjoyed reliving the year through our 47 blog posts, and also recognize that we have many people to thank for all the activities and events that we attended in 2018.

This blog post includes images that link to our 2018 blog posts, as well as all of our 88 @sos_jr year-end thank-you tweets from New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.

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.