Hot again today, but it’s always cooler in the shade of the woods, so we weren’t too worried. Can’t be any hotter than we’ve seen in Florida, anyway. Headed south out of the campground on what we learned was the “camp trail,” though there were no markings to indicate that. In fact, we learned there were few markings to indicate many of the trails. It started out as a pretty nice dirt trail with a few stones, narrow and surrounded by heavy woods, just the way we like it. Then we came to the first T intersection, where there were no indications of any of the trails, red, blue or yellow, just one sign pointing to the right for the lake overlook. According to the map, though, it looked like we were supposed to go left, so we did, and the trail widened into a dirt, gravel and grass road. That soon led us to what was marked on the map as the “Forest HQ”, but all we saw were several maintenance buildings, which we circled around look for the yet again unmarked trail. Not finding anything, we headed down the driveway toward the road looking for signs, finally noticed a path that went around the gate. From there, there was nothing. There was a large field and some barns across the road, and a few horse trailers parked in it, but it looked like a farm. After reviewing the map, we decided to head down the road to the right, and about a quarter mile down the road we finally found a blue marker. The next several miles was on a gravel and dirt forest service road, our least favorite kind of horse trail. FINALLY, the trail turned off to a real trail that suddenly went from easy to challenging, a very narrow trail that had obviously not been very well-maintained, lots of downed trees and branches, steeper inclines until we reached a creek, which the trail followed for a while before climbing back up again. Trail turned back to a road. Somewhere along the way we found waypoint markers that indicated we were going in completely the wrong direction than we thought, going counter-clockwise on the loop rather than clockwise. Eventually the road reached the main highway, and paralleled that for a ways, until we finally opened up into a large field that turned out to be the field we saw earlier with the barns and horse trailers! I read somewhere that the trails were well-marked, and they kind of are once you’re ON the trail, but every intersection was a mystery! Though we started out in the woods so the heat wasn’t too bad, many of the roads were open to the sun, and the heat became really debilitating pretty quickly. Nevertheless, it was a pretty good ride, we did manage to get quite a few canters and trots in on the straight-aways. Gave the horses a bath when we got back to cool them down a bit, then crashed ourselves, wiped out from the heat. It shouldn’t be this hot here in May! Hope it cools off soon!
