Saturday, March 23rd - Millennium Plaza and Beyond

Knowing it would be a long week with all the kids home on Spring Break, we moved this week's walk up to Saturday. Katje's son came along and volunteered as photographer, taking lots of pictures of the spring flowers that are popping up all over. It's been a mild winter but it's sure nice to have spring back!

We followed the road for a short distance, then turned onto the Kincaid Curlicue Corridor, which winds down through a monstrously huge apartment complex to the river. I wasn't paying attention and sent us in the wrong direction (have I mentioned that I can't read maps?), which turned out to be a good thing because it led to a group of tall standing stones engraved with lines of poetry, well worth the little side trip. The path past that soon ended so we turned around and headed back in the right direction, paralleling the river. The instructions in the 'Walk There' book say that we should go to the Water Sports Center and from there return to State Street via Oswego Pointe Drive. The map shows the path ending with a sharp right turn at a set of stairs. Well, there is a set of stairs just past the Water Sports Center that lead up into yet more of this behemoth of an apartment complex, but the path continues past it. So we continued on until the path abruptly ended with no way to go but back (there were no steps and even if there were, there were enough “no trespassing” signs to make it clear that we would not have been welcome to use them). So back we went, taking the set of stairs that we had passed (and that Katje's son thought was the right one all along) up through the apartment complex – this didn't seem like a very public walkway, but at least there were no unfriendly signs telling us we shouldn't be there.

Back through the apartment complex we went until we reached the car. The walk as described in the book continues along State Street and eventually leads down to George Rogers Park, the starting point of our Old River Road walk back in January. We stopped at the car and took a vote about continuing, and unanimously decided that since we were already back at the car we were all okay with just piling in and heading back home. We discussed whether this was enough of the walk to mark it out of our book and decided that with all of the 'side trips' we took (and the dullness of the rest of the walk) we're checking this one off. After all, we still have 41 walks to go in that book and another 25 left in 'Every Day Hikes', so it's not like we're going to run out any time soon!