Off-Road Trekking, kind of, but mostly river-trekking

Safari Trekkin’
Today we were trying to decide what to do since we both (The Girl & I) had today off. We finally decided to trek through some trails we hadn’t seen before. These were not hiking trails but driving trails, so there you have it. I found about 3 local trails on trails.com. I had to sign up for a trial membership to get the details, and it wasn’t worth it, but that’s history anyway, so on with today’s news.

The trail took us up through hills that we hadn’t even known existed before today. It was rather cool. These were steep slopes intertwined with rolling hills, dotted with cows at pasture and the occasional farm house. This was all quite removed from any town and was really rather impressive. We want to move to someplace very, very similar, in fact. What we saw was what we want to see daily. Today was sort of a reminder of what we’re really after in life. I want to be a semi-successful farmer, dammit, and go off-roading and hiking & trail-forging twice a week, and work cattle and land the other 5 days a week.

Anyway, this wasn’t as much 4x4-ing as I had hoped for. I could probably have made it with an Accord or a Taurus or something, albeit not as fast. And since it was essentially blockaded on either side by “private property,” there wasn’t anywhere to pull off and picnic like I had hoped, and let the puppies frolic in the open fields.

Sort of. See, it’s pretty open and yet wooded in places. And not only that, but there’s no buildings or homes or people for miles. Next time, some time in the future, we plan to totally squat on someone’s land for an afternoon and picnic. And maybe let the dogs try their hand at cattle rustling. Ha ha, OK maybe not the cattle rustling, but we’ll find a spot and frolic, frolic all day long!

But we’re not quite through yet.

Even though the prescribed trip was sort of a bust in the picnic arena, we did end up finding a place to park it along a river on the way back. A ‘main’ road back ran along a river and I managed to spy a little trail that led down to it. It was a hairy little trail, very tight and fun (!), and it landed us in prime location to hang out, have lunch, and let the dogs run around and play a little. This wasn’t some little creek, I mean this thing was some two football fields across, from bank to bank. Now since it’s fall and not spring, there was plenty of exposed bedrock, so we had a nice wide swath to park it on. All-in-all, it was a fun and productive day, despite the crappy directions of the trails.com “guide”. I don’t plan on getting into that, but just take with you that the road we found was quite less than expected, and also hidden behind a layer of verbal retardation that took two grown adults 30 miles & an hour to decipher.

The trial membership shall be cancelled shortly. Bleh.



New photos up
No new albums or anything, but I got a few good shots of the new guys and wanted to post them. Chase, especially. I haven’t had good opportunities to get many quality shots of him; black’s always hardest. But today all the variables were working in his favor, so I pulled of a good two or twelve at least. Check them out, huh?