Still didn't have a great night sleep last night, not sure why, maybe it's too cool! Wouldn't that be a switch! Anyway, I started out slowly this morning, but eventually decided to take Apollo for a ride just to get a feel for the trails and the neighborhood. Got him saddled up and headed out of the camp out the driveway and on to the orange trailhead, as I had been told the blue trail was mostly downhill and therefore much muddier than the other trails, so that's where I headed. I had estimated just a short 5+- mile around the smallest loop I could find, but naturally I got lost and ending up doing 7.75 miles instead. I swear, the hardest thing to do is to follow a map and a trail that's been done by people that have ridden those trails so long they never even think about what it's like to be a newbie. As usual, once you're on a trail the markings are generally clear, but for some reason, as the intersections, it become a whole new ballgame, there seldom seems to be clear markings as to which way to go. When I finally reached an intersection that I understood, I realized I have gone about twice as far as I had planned, and that I was on the east side of the loop when I though I was on the west side of it. Since I didn't want to have to stretch out the ride to another, longer loop, I uncharacteristically turned around to return to where I was going to go in the first place. Along the way, I passed a group of riders from a summer camp, a long string of 15+ horses with young people astride. I asked the leader if I was going in the right direction to get to back to the orange trail, and she gave me a fairly detailed description of where to find it, and off I went. A quarter mile later, a car caught up to me (several of the trails follow roads for a ways, not my favorite), and she told me the leader was concerned she had given me wrong directions and asked her to chase me down to correct it! You gotta love Ohioans, they go above and beyond to be helpful! Of course, in spite of all the help, that didn't keep me from getting lost a few more times along the way. I kept following the orange tags on the trees, and then the markings painted on the roads (which are pretty faded and covered with dirt, so they're easy to miss) and tried to follow the map, but the way the trails are marked on the map are painted with a really broad brush. When I zoom into it on Google Earth, the markings cover about 100 yards on the ground, so kind of tough to see where the trail really is. And when I finally made it back and put the trail on my overlay, in some places it wasn't even close! Guess I better have a conversation with trailmeister Ellen before I head out again! After following orange tags around in a circle of little used jungle, I opted for the more traveled path, which took me to the road across from the KOA, and from there I just followed the road home. Not what the trail was supposed to do, and even after looking at it on Google Earth I can't figure out where I went wrong. Sigh... Oh, well, never a dull moment! I finally made I back to camp, and as I was unsaddling Apollo, one of the Trustees of the club, Elaine, came over to see if I was all right. She was concerned that I went out on my own and was taking a long time to get back, so she stayed around just to make sure everything was okay with me. Like I said, above and beyond! Once I assured her everything was fine other than the occasional detour, she headed on out, promising to come by another day over the weekend. Overall a decent ride, some muddy spots like everywhere we've been this year, but mostly dirt, very little gravel, so boots were not necessary, thank goodness. I let Apollo graze on clover for a bit, treated Flash's foot again, then got busy getting Hubby on his dialysis session before finally settling down for the evening.
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