2020 09 24 - City Park, Hastings - River Flats, Lake Rebecca and Jaycee Parks

Still hoping every day to work. No work in the AM. We then decided to stay local. This is a park that we have been to in the past but not in the last couple of years.

I didn't realize it until I was starting this write-up. The city has this listed as three different parks. I don't remember seeing signs for any of them, and there is nothing between them. I'm guessing it has to do with 'additions.' Instead of just enlarging the existing park, they gave each one a new name.

If you know the area, you can see the rail bridge just past the highway bridge in the center. This trail starts down by the rail bridge ... or so I thought. I learn a lot by doing these write-ups and looking up the facts.

The 'river trail' starts by the bridge and runs along the west side of the Mississippi River up to Lock and Dam #2. BUT, by looking it up on the Hastings website, I see that the trail, marked trail, runs all the way around the city of Hastings. It looks like about 2/3's of the trail is in parks and the other 1/3 follows the highway or is on city streets.

Today there are long sections of the trail under construction. It looks like the 'east branch,' coming from down town to the park is under construction, as is the first section in the park.

So we parked just past the construction and walked north. No boats today around the boat landing so we parked in one of those spots, but far enough back that no one could park behind us and block us in. As if that would be a problem. In that section there were 10 spots and three cars. On the other side of the landing are spots for another 20 cars and there are another 3 there.

We start walking north and then notice a trail we haven't been on before, I'm guessing it has always been there. Turns out it just follows the road instead of following the river. When the two trails meet again, the trail beyond is closed so we return along the river.

That short walk was only about 20 minutes because we couldn't go any further and we didn't want to backtrack.

So we walked over by Lake Rebecca. Usually there are lots of people fishing and the parking lots we can see are full. Turns out there are more parking lots that cant be seen from the street. So lots of room.

Oh ... when we started heading for the lake, someone in the distance was heading that way too. We looked away and he was gone. Had to have walked off into the woods. He did look like someone who may be living there somewhere but we couldn't see any paths so he is covering his tracks.

On this leg we found geese. 100? Look down, watch where you walk. Out here we did see one person fishing. By looking at a map this is a land locked lake, so not sure what people are fishing for. But they do have a couple of fishing piers.

This is what our walk looked like today. My wife turns on an app called MapMyWalk every time we walk. We have had it on when doing mall walks and it does pretty good. We have also had it on when we walk our neighborhood and it has been so far off that the distance we walked was double the actual.

Nice day for a walk, near 70 degrees, leaves are falling, very little wind, mostly sunny and not many people midday.

When we were done with our walk we drove a mile down the road to a cemetery. Today both markers we were looking for were found by driving down the 'streets.' I left the car running and walked less than 10 feet to take each picture. We were likely there less than 10 minutes so not much of an extra walk today.

It's looking like this weekend may be good for more parks.