Walking on the Bike Path - Thanksgiving Afternoon

It is our tradition to celebrate Thanksgiving with a meal, and to go for a walk after that meal. However, it is not necessarily our tradition to celebrate Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving Day. That's the case this year, and Saturday will be the day for family and fun and feasting. We did have lunch and a walk today, after our morning delivering meals for Equinox. Lunch was nothing special - a bagael with cream cheese and a cup of coffee at Dunkin Donuts - but the walk was on the bike path, and it was.

Today was mild - I was comfortable with a flannel shirt over a cotton tee shirt - and overcast: the sky was mottled, with alternating gray and white swirls. If you looked hard enough at the white parts, you could almost see a hint of blue behind them. The river and inlets were so still they mirrored every leaf and branch.

We walked west. The first thing we noticed was that there were no birds to be seen - no Great American Egrets like on our last walk, and none of the ubiquitous Canada Geese. If we stopped and listened hard, we could hear twittering, but at first we could not see any birds. That changed later in the walk.

There were a surprising number of people on the path at 1 pm. The first person we saw was a Back of the Pack jogger coming towards us. Though the side to side pumping of her arms was not efficient and her strides were labored, her pace was steady and determined. I loved her immediately, and clapped and cheered for her and wished her a Happy Thanksgiving. She smiled as she passed, and I know that smile.

We saw a family of people, probably eastern Europeans, three generations. The two women wore what looked like traditional scarves over their heads. The men wore black. There were two small children, a boy and a girl. They were walking, but the dad of the boy was pulling a little scooter. Later the boy stood on the scooter, while his dad pulled it, and him, along. We wished them all a Happy Thanksgiving as we passed, and they returned the greeting.

We noticed that the ground was clear and free around the four-foot high grave stone shaped marker, engraved with "S9" - nine miles to Schenectady, a remnant from the days this bike path was a railroad track. Two years ago it had become so overgrown that during one of my walks, I carried in clippers and a pruner and cleared away the brush. I noticed that after that, it pretty much remained that way.

Just beyond the marker and just before the orange bridge at the one mile marker there is a small inlet on the left. The ripples in the water caught our attention - they were being made by a beaver. He glided over to a point of land and up to a downed sapling, where he stripped off a small branch. He swam with it to the middle of the inlet, dove down, and disappeared. We waited for a while, but he did not resurface.

By now, we could see, as well as hear,chickadees and bluejays. Just beyond the bridge on the left there is a small stream flowing through the grasses. We noticed three young women peering over the bank, and one of them was taking pictures of something in the water. When we got to the spot and looked over, we saw about a dozen mallards, male and female, swimming in the stream, and moving in and out of the grasses. The males were crowned with vibrant green, while the females wore more muted browns.

Two bicyclists passed us, one on a mountain bike, the soft tires humming on the asphalt, the other, long and thin and lycra clad, speeding by on a road bike.

We turned around at the cabbage patch, about a mile and a half from the start. We both stretched, the joints on my back cracking, and my hamstring protesting just a bit against the cold. While I was bent over, a gorgeous white and brown English Setter came over and did with his nose what dogs do. He was on a retractable leash and his owner, one of a group of six, quickly reeled him in and assured me the dog was friendly. Any friendlier and we would have to get married.

By now we were warmed up, and the walk back was quicker. We noticed that a beaver had joined the mallards, and could not tell if it was our old friend or one of his kin. Close to the finish, we spotted a large whitish mushroom on the trunk of a tree about 5 feet off the ground, shaped just like a bun. Closer inspection revealed that it was, indeed, a hamburger bun, stuck over a small branch. Maybe a new kind of bird feeder?

Back where we began, we saw that the picnic tables had been removed for the winter, with only their anchors remaining. There was a vine wreath tacked to the frame of a window of the old train station, the vines interlaced with seasonal orange and brown leaves and fruits. We knew the season was over when we saw that the bathrooms were locked and the entrance was chained. Not so bad for men - not so good for women.

The bike path is a marvel to us through all the seasons and today it gave us as fine a walk as we have had all year. We had our 3 mile walk, and we had our river and our sights and our wildlife, and we did not have our big meal, so our waist lines and hearts are the better for it, in many ways. And I did add 270 fit points to my Fitlinxx account. Can't ask for a better day than this one.