Tour de Rochester Parks

Total for this ride: 21.1 miles
Total for this year: 1323.6 miles

This was a cool ride -- something new and entirely different.  It was Bob's brainchild, so I let him take the lead, and it turned out to be a great time.

He took us on an "adventure" -- he knew generally what waypoints he wanted to hit, but he wasn't sure exactly how he was going to get us there.  So we started out as we often do, riding up the Lehigh Valley Trail then turning east on the Erie Canal Towpath.  Nothing new there.  But then in Brighton we turned north off the trail through Meridian Point Park and wandered around there for a while until we got our bearings and worked our way over to Winton Rd.  Then it was north on Winton for a while until we made a quick west turn and then back north through a residential area.

First major waypoint was Cobbs Hill Reservoir Park, home of the reservoir which supplies much of Rochester with its water.  Stopped long enough to enjoy a nice view of the city skyline before heading back down the hill and through another residential neighborhood.

The next waypoint was the Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, which traces its heritage to 1817, the year in which the Hamilton Theological and Literary Institute was established.  The current campus dates back to the late 1920's.

We cut through the grounds of the school and back down to the street, then it was off to Highland Park, where Bob told me stories about playing there as a kid.  We also visited the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, which I believe was dedicated about the time we moved to Rochester in 1996.

From there it was over to Mt. Hope Cemetery, then through the UR campus to Genesee Valley Park where we paid our respects to the recently toppled "Tree Of Life" -- an absolutely beautiful old oak tree which was probably the best-known tree in Rochester.  I remember well how I climbed on it with the other guys from my hall on the very day my parents dropped me off for my first year of college.

That brought us back to the canal, where we retraced our path back to campus.  All in all, a really fun ride to some sites I'd never seen before from the saddle of a bike.