Husband makes tracks for wife’s happy trails

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Dave and Andrea Guest outside thier Park Avenue home with snowshoes and skiis. He uses his snowshoes to help pack down a cross country ski loop at the Mettowee River Park for his wife of 25 years.

Breaking trail for his Valentine for 25 years

Cross-country skiing can be difficult when the snow is deep, like this winter.

The narrow skis sometimes founder in the light powdery fluff that has fallen across Granville so many times this year, making it tough going for anyone who wants to ski someplace other than the well-packed Rail Trail.

That is unless you’ve got a husband like Dave Guest, his wife, Andrea, said.

The couple, who will celebrate 25 years of marriage in the fall, both enjoy outdoor activities which for Andrea Guest include cross-country skiing. “She skis and I like to snowshoe,” he said.

Guest said she prefers to ski a loop around the outside of Mettowee River Park off Church Street but keeping the loop packed down has proved to be difficult with the frequent snowstorms. That’s where her husband stepped in.

“I just kind of did it on a whim. It was my day off and I was going to go ice fishing but I went down and packed the trail instead,” he said. Dave Guest said he went down and broke a trail around the entire loop after the last big storm as he has done before.

“I like snowshoeing and I figured with all of this new snow it was the perfect time to get out there and do it,” he said.

The loop takes about 30 minutes to ski around non-stop but takes considerably longer on snowshoes. “I had already made a path and then we got all of this snow – I figured it would make it easier (for Andrea),” he said.

Andrea Guest said she started cross-country skiing again over the past couple of years for fitness and found the snowmobile-packed surface of the Rail Trail a bit hard to handle. In Mettowee River Park, she said, the skiing is like leaving town, but is just a short walk from her Park Street home. The ski loop is quiet and peaceful just like the countryside but also close to home, making it the perfect place to burn some calories.

“It’s great exercise,” she said. “And I can grab (my skis) and go right down and not pay a lot of money like at the ski hills.”

The thoughtful gesture of a husband for his bride almost didn’t happen.

For the Guests, who are now the parents of three boys, Brian, Eric and Tyler, the relationship nearly failed to get off the ground.

The couple met in Glens Falls on New Year’s Eve.

However, when he called and arranged a date, Andrea Guest said she almost didn’t go when the time came.

“I realized he was not from Granville and I didn’t know him and I didn’t know his family. So when he was coming over I told my mother, ‘Tell him I’m not going,’” she said.

Dave Guest moved to the area and was working, as he does now, in corrections, but he is originally from Middleburg, living in Glens Falls at the time.

Andrea Guest said her mother consulted her Uncle Ed, who also worked in corrections and vouched for the character of her would-be suitor. “Uncle Ed said it was OK; he was all right,” she said. “And here we are.”

The couple were married in 1986 and will celebrate 25 years together in October.