You Gotta Kiss a lot of Toads

You gotta kiss a lot of toads...17 so far to be exact. How does this apply to my hiking adventures? One of my recent hikes was to Miami Whitewater Forest. In my hiking world, it was a "toad."  This is a beautiful park, but the trail is paved - which is great for the runners and the bicyclists, but not so great for hikers wanting to take in the wilderness. I had a great time on this "hike" because I got to hike with my daughter and my sister (who was visiting from Nevada.) We hiked 6.3 miles in two hours and 10 minutes.

We started the hiking by walking along the lake. We saw people out on paddle boats and others fishing. It wasn't long before we were headed into the park and away from the water. We hit the Shaker Trace Trail and decided to try walking the Outer Loop. We came upon a parking lot for horse trailers and the spot on the trail that can be used by horseback riders, bikers, and walkers alike. We found it funny that it said "Yield to Horses." Wondering who wouldn't know to get out of the way of an animal as large as a horse. Soon we reached a bridge and we noticed that the river was low and the water was hardly moving. This was true each time the path met up with the river. I'm sure when we have the normal amount of rainfall you would likely hear the water moving, but that wasn't the case on this day. We reached a spot where we were walking through open fields and had views of farms and an old cemetery. Morgan was recovering from a stomach bug from a couple of days prior, so we turned around at this point and headed back the way we came. Suddenly it didn't seem like a very good idea for her to be out walking that far in the heat. To break up the monotony of the paved trail, Morgan and Pam posed near the horse signs. We were grateful for the big clouds in the sky because it was a really muggy day, we were very sweaty and knew it would be worse if the sun was beating on the pavement.

Blogging about this hike gave me pause to think about how many of these hikes have been "toads" and how many have been "princes." I went back through the hikes, reading some posts and looking at pictures. I counted 25 princes, 17 toads, and 3 hikes that I couldn't really decide weather they were princes or toads because they were kind of a mixture of each - maybe I could call them "proads" or "trinces?"

Total miles hiked through August:  155.29

45 hikes down and 15 to go!!!!!