Never Let Your Guard Down

On Saturday, August 18, Ryan and I headed to Versailles State Park in Indiana. That's not where we were planning on going to hike, but when we put the two hiking locations we were intending to go to into the GPS, it said that they were 79 miles away, a 2 hour drive..."within 60 miles" my #@*! This is not the first time that we have wondered if Tammy York traveled to these hiking locations by flying through the air or from some unique teleporting capabilities. Regardless, next week we will be celebrating the Mitchger Wedding Palooza, so the weekend was busy with preparations to make. With so much to do, hiking two hikes over two hours away was not in the cards.

The park was really easy to find, but the trail head, not so much. Fortunately, Ryan and I figured out pretty quickly that we were not headed on the right trail, so we got out the compass and oriented ourselves. After the small adjustment, we found the trail head and we were on our way. I was proud that I remembered last week I'd wished I'd gotten the compass out a little more often.  It definitely came in handy several times during this hike.

We were looking forward to the waterfalls that Tammy York describes in her book, but I guess they weren't really flowing - maybe due to the drought? The trail had some great hills from the start and we both agreed that it was an awesome workout throughout.  Ryan and I were surprised by the fall colored leaves littering the trail. We wondered if this was also a result of the drought. It was a strange contrast to the summer greenery around us.

The trail was a loop and a figure 8, so we used the Endomondo map, the park map, and the compass to keep ourselves oriented and make sure that we were staying on track. We did a really great job with this and after we hiked almost 5 miles and were nearing the end, we started chatting a little too much, we let our guard down and suddenly we were lost. There were some detours, backtracking, tracing and retracing of steps. Just when I thought I had no idea which way to go next, we got out the compass and it gave us the confidence we needed to know that we were at least going in the right direction. Where we took our wrong turn, I have no idea. Instead of hiking the 4.77 miles as stated in the book, we hiked 6.1 miles.

Despite the wrong turns and extra steps, this was a great hike and somewhere that I'd return to hike again. The trails were well-kept and the ups and downs made it a great workout. Thanks to Ryan I was not on my own and I was grateful for that. This hike definitely helped contribute to the development of my map reading skills-which still need a lot of development!

43 hikes down and 17 to go!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!