Well, the kids are back in school and Andrew and I are left with each other and time. 🙂
So what do we do? We planned a hike. We thought about the sweat we built up the first time we did this trail and decided let’s give it a go! This time I DID track the route and oh boy I am so glad that I did. We ended up going further on the trail than the time with the kids. The first time with the kids was approximately 3 miles. This time 6.5!!!!! Woooo go us!!
Looking at my MapmyFitness map you can see the first loop; that’s the trails we did the first time with the kids. The whole map uploaded on here is from today clearly noted with the 6.51 miles.
On this footbridge some cool things happened! We had another encounter with a deer. Again it was near a water source and deep in the woods where we could only get a glimpse.
Andrew stopped dead and we heard snapping of branches.
We flipped our heads in time to see part of the deer running and
we heard its massive footsteps. It’s hooves sounded massive and powerful.
I’m convinced it was a big buck. We heard the deer’s breathe. A deep strong huff.
It was such a surreal experience. Awesome.
 The Milton A. Cowdey Memorial Trail is the other loop that we did today that added the other 3.5 miles to the previous trails we had hiked already with the kids. It started off wicked calm and awesome, then things got rocky, literally. There were soooo many rocks. the trail was loosely marked so that made it challenging. The elevation fluctuations were killer too. In the middle of writing the last part of the previous sentence i began thinking about the other blogs/ instagrams I’ve seen recently about hiking and how many miles they do and the terrain and the elevations they do ALL THE TIME and I’m like, wow I’m a bitch.
On this trail, I got STUNG! I’m not sure by what, but it hurt like a mother fucker! My leg went heavy for a while on the trail. The adrenaline my body was producing from getting stung/hiking this terrain, helped keep the real pain wayyyyyy down for me. It was real. I couldn’t even believe it. Last week outside in our baseball field there was a hornet hovering around me and then I guess I pissed it off because it started following me aggressively and Andrew had to come over and blindsided the thing dead. I didn’t get stung that day but look now! Earlier on the trail i had seen bees/wasps/whatever flying around a couple foot bridges and to this date I had never seen any on any of the Audubon trails until today. These are some crazy coincidences dontchya think?
“A Tree burl results from a tree undergoing some form of stress. It may be caused by an injury, virus or fungus. Most burls grow beneath the ground, attached to the roots as a type ofmalignancy that is generally not discovered until the tree dies or falls over. Such burls sometimes appear as groups of bulbous protrusions connected by a system of rope-like roots. Almost all burl wood is covered by bark, even if it is underground. Insect infestation and certain types of mold infestation are the most common causes of this condition.”
Here are some more photos of the farm remains previously mentioned in the other post. Honestly at this point we knew we were almost done and we were just that, done. We had never hiked this long at once. This was great. I am not sure what Andrew thinks of today because we haven’t talked much about it. I mean, we both agreed that it was good but no real indepth discussion.
I want to go back. Maybe not get stung by anything next time though!
Tash Fit Life 