Blooming Along With The Daffodils

 

The tent is up; a sign the Daffodil Festival is around the corner.

Visit #1594, Sunday 19 April 26, 6:10-8:35AM, 3.8 miles, 10.8 lbs. of litter.

Temps in the 40s, light rain.

Today's early start and finish were necessary so I could return home in time to watch the last 40 miles or so of the Netherlands spring bicycle racing classic Amstel Gold. Now get your brain out of the gutter; we're not watching beer, we're watching a bicycle race!

Just like parts of the race, there was light rain on today's hike. During last week's hike, when I was made aware of spray painted hearts on rocks in the park, I suspected if I looked in the right places I would find more. So I packed spray paint just in case. I was not disappointed. In fact I found more than red hearts; way too many tags to count, all red. I think I covered them all.

Foam stickers numbers 19-22 for 2026 were removed.

And I continue to be appreciated although I don't resemble that plate.

I found and removed Cat Graffiti numbers 24 and 25 since 2016.

At the gate across from Belmont Avenue were a couple new tags. I didn't have brown paint with me today and removing them with other methods would eat into bike race watching time so I used what I had on me. I'll return with brown paint in the near future.

The big task was this new graffiti I found on the walkbridge over I-691.

I knew this would take significant time to remove but I gave it a cursory effort. Not much difference.

Using my conventional methods would take forever so I left it for now and vowed to return later in the day with my industrial cleaner to complete the job.

On the way back to the park I cleaned up the dirt parking area and collected quite a bit of litter. There was no way I was going to add it to this trash can which was already way beyond capacity, so I brought this week's collected trash home.

The photo above was taken at roughly 8:30AM. When I returned to the park at 5PM it still looked like that.

I did return later Sunday afternoon and vanquished the graffiti on the walkbridge. Except for hiking to and from the walkbridge, my scrubbing time was twenty minutes.

Here's hoping there's good weather for the next two weekends for the Daffodil Festival.