Its been pretty hot and humid around here recently, so as people are wont to do on such occasions, we decided to go out for ice cream. Of course, we are also trying to stick to a diet that generally does not include real ice cream, so we had to find an excuse to get some. That's when we decided to go for a walk in a nearby state forest that we have been to on occasion, which also happens to be in close proximity to the best ice cream in the world. We downloaded a few maps from the state's web site, and found a nice place to park for free (damned tourist season) at the trailhead of a nice little 2 mile walk. We loaded ourselves up with sunscreen and plunked Nathan into his backpack (on my back) and trekked off on our nice little walk.
A little ways into the walk, the trail split in a place it wasn't supposed to, according to the map. There were no markings on either trail, so we ignored the advice of Robert Frost and took the one that seemed most used since our walk was along one fo the "main" trails in the park. This seemed to be going well. We got to see some wildlife (2 deer, a handful of toads, and 4 horses), and Nathan was having a good time. Then Alison started looking at her map and saying, "we should have crossed a road by now." Well, shortly after that, we did come to a road. According to the map, the trail should have picked up just across the road, but it was just woods. Being the adventurous types that we are, we decided that the map was probably just a little goofy, and we started walking up the road (just a little dirt road). Eventually, we came to a trail heading back the direction we had come. Again, we just figured the map was goofy, and Alison thought she had figured out where we were on said map, and so we headed in what we thought was the right direction. After following this still unmarked trail for a long time, we got to a 4 way intersection. This was not on the map. I don't just mean that we were wrong about where we thought we were walking (but we were), I mean that there are a total of zero four way trail intersections on the map. Calling on our vast experiences, we figured out which direction was most likely to lead back to the car (south, for those of you keeping score), and headed that way. We walked and walked for quite a while. Nathan fell asleep for about 30 minutes. Then we got to another intersection that actually had a marked trail! The bad news is that we had no idea where we were. Looking at our oh-so-reliable map while uttering a few choice words (remember - Nathan was asleep) we decided that we would just have to follow this marked trail until it hit a road, and then take the roads back to our car.
We followed this trail for a while, and eventually came to a big swamp. "Oooh!" we exclaimed. "A landmark!" we cheered. Then, after consulting our map again, we estimated that we were at the complete opposite end of the forest from where our car was. After uttering several more choice words, we decided to stick to our original plan of walking until we hit a road, just in case we were wrong about our location. This was the best decision we made during the whole trip. After walking a while more, we came to a clearing with a soccer field and gazebo that we had seen at the beginning of our adventure. We were quite surprised, since the big swamp we had just left was not marked on our map at all. Shortly after finding this landmark, we emereged from the woods right where we had parked our car 3 hours earlier. It turns out that we turned around and came down the road less traveled that we had ignored at the beginning of this story (damned poets). All said and done, our 2 mile walk ended up being nearly 7 miles, according to the scale of the map and the trails we think we took.
The ice cream was really good.
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