Wednesday, May 23, 2012 – Last Ride Day at Pennyrile, The Orange Trail

One more trail to do here, the Orange Trail, and as it turned out, it became our favorite! Much more “trail” than road, though not really much better marked than the rest, again, mostly at the intersections. One waypoint of interest was the Hamby Cemetery, a small family plot dating back to births before the Revolutionary War, 1774 pre-USA! We stopped there for a snack, a rest and a horse apple break before pressing on. This was a great trail. Again, though, when we hit a forest road, it was again poorly marked. The map indicated we should go directly across the road, but there was nothing there, a right turn up the road didn’t seem to take us anywhere, so we turned left, knowing that was at least in the right direction toward the center of the park, and thus would cross other trails. Fifty yards or so up we saw an opening for a trail on the right, though it wasn’t marked orange, we took it anyway, just to get off the road. A short ways in we realized Clio had lost one of her Easyboots (Hubby had made a repair to it a few days ago, but it was obviously too far gone), so we turned back a bit to try to find it, but then decided it was too far to go just to retrieve a boot that was probably beyond repair anyway (so if you see that boot on the east side of the Orange Loop, help yourself!) Got a little turned around at one spot, again, but managed to find ourselves back on the right track, and got back to camp safe and sound, delighted that we have found a trail as good as that one here, especially after our slow start on the Blue Trail. Once we got back to camp, we started packing up for our departure tomorrow.