Month: August 2026

Bob and I headed back out on the OCA (Old Croton Aqueduct) trail today. We have walked it north for about an hour from right in our neighborhood, and we’ve walked it south as far as the village of Irvington. Today, we drove to Irvington to walk the trail from there to Dobb’s Ferry. It was a warm walk, as it is a bit more humid than yesterday and much of our walk in Dobb’s Ferry was not shaded,

Just as a reminder, the Croton Aqueduct was built in the 1830s to bring water from the Croton Reservoir, 41 miles north of New York City, into the city using just gravity to convey the water. In 1968, the state bought 26.2 miles of the original aqueduct path to create a linear park.

As when we walked from Tarrytown to Irvington, we saw a number of lovely homes along the trail.

Mercy University is a private, non-sectarian, non-profit, co-educational research university. Its main campus is on these 66 acres in Dobbs Ferry, but it also has campuses in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Yorktown Heights. It offers more than 90 undergraduate and graduate programs.

The portion of the trail that we walked today is sometimes on the same level as the surrounding land, but is sometimes above the areas surrounding it.

Dobbs Ferry, also in Westchester County, is a village of about 11,500 people today. It is named for the ferry service started in the early 1700s by John Dobbs. The ferry service provided key transportation for American forces in August of 1781 to allow additional troops to join Washington’s in a battle at Yorktown that helped end the war. The ferry service here continued until 1945.

We walked along Main Street in Dobbs Ferry and saw a number of retail stores and restaurants as well as a bank and a library in a mix of older and newer buildings.

We then walked across the train tracks, via the walkover bridge, to check out the Dobbs Ferry Waterfront Park. We even got a faint view of part of the New York City skyline.

Yesterday, Bob and I had a great visit with my cousin Traci and her husband Paul who made the 2 hour drive down from Kinderhook, NY, to Tarrytown. They got here about 12:30. We were able to catch up for about 45 minutes before we walked downtown for our lunch reservations and then we chatted back at the house again afterwards until they headed back about 4:15. It was a lovely and very unusual day for us when we are housesitting, and, of course, we had cleared having them in the house with the homeowners ahead of time.

Since the weekend was mostly filled with us planning and cleaning for their arrival (we may be a bit OCD about this since we don’t entertain very often), we were ready to get out for a walk today.

We drove back to the trailhead near the reservoir to walk on the Empire State Trail again, but this time heading south. It was still a lovely, shaded walks with lots of cyclists, but it took us by an industrial/business area with a couple of street crossings. There is a humane society located along the path as well, so we saw a number of volunteers out walking the shelter dogs. The downside was there were a lot of gnats along the trail, mostly at the end of the walk, otherwise we may not have walked as far.

We did not continue on the trail at this point. We stopped at a gas station instead to cash in a winning lottery ticket ($4) and to purchase a couple of tickets for tonight’s drawing.

Before I start on today’s short outing, I wanted to make a quick remark about the weather. While large parts of Europe, Canada, and the American Northwest are or have been dealing with destructive and sometimes deadly wildfires, the weather worry here has been rain. We have had at least one flood watch or warning here every week that we’ve been here and many places in the surrounding states have been flooded.

We have been lucky so far in Tarrytown, and perhaps living at least half a mile steeply uphill from the river helps, but there are signs of the wet weather, including the photo below.

Anyhoo, today was sunny after another rainy day yesterday, so we got out to do a bit of hiking. We headed back to the Rockefeller State Park Preserve for our 3rd hike. This time, we were headed for the trail that goes around Swan Lake within the park. This was the most populated trail that we’ve hiked in the preserve, with lots of dog walkers, a couple of photographers (with actual cameras), and a bird watcher, in addition to others of us just out for a walk. As with the duckless Duck Pond in Croton-on-Hudson the other day, Swan Lake was swanless but pretty all the same.

Some days on our outings we walk to walk, and sometimes we walk to explore. Yesterday, we headed out to walk part of yet another trail in the area. We drove about 10 minutes to a trailhead for the 750-mile Empire State Trail. We walked an hour out and an hour back — somewhere between 2 and 3 miles each way, so we barely scratched the surface of this trail. And we were not alone, we saw a couple of runners and two or three other walkers, but we were passed by quite a few bikers on the paved trail.

Today we took the Metro North Railroad train that runs south to Grand Central Station in New York City and north along the Hudson River to Poughkeepsie for the first time. We went north for the 20 minute trip to the Croton-Harmon station, the second stop from Tarrytown. We first explored Croton Point Park, which lies west of the train station, and then walked back past the train station to explore a bit of the town.

Croton Point Park is a 508 acre park situated on a peninsula in the town of Croton-on-Hudson, New York. It has a small beach, Nature Center, and lots of picnic areas along the Hudson River which were being used on this sunny Saturday.

Croton-on-Hudson, still in Westchester County, is a village of about 8,300 about 21 miles north of Tarrytown. Bob found us a couple of different retail areas to explore.