January 13th, 2020

Joy and I loaded up our cameras and we are back out there!  Woohoo!

Somewhere along the line and it's been so long now I honestly do not remember the details, one or the other of us came into possession of a compilation of all of the parks, preserves and trails in this general area.  It was like finding a treasure map!

Some of them are literally parks...the sort of swingsets and monkey bars...and while those are very fun and adorable and I find it hard to resist the siren call of a good swingset, that's not what we are looking for.  So those we found, checked out and then checked off the list.  

Others were actual places to hike but so small that even if you went slowly and circled three times, you would still have not spent more than an hour.  So while those are perfectly fine, those are reserved for days when we don't have a lot of time, or combine them with other, better, longer hikes.

Most of them we have now been to and really enjoy and go back over and over again.  And each visit feels like the first visit because there are different trails to hike, new things to see, a variety of things in bloom and certainly there is no predicting what sort of wildlife will be wandering by each and every time.

But there are been a few that we have simply never found.  The directions, in a rather broad and ambiguous way, is right there on our literature. And yet...still a mystery.  One of them, as it turns out you  need a boat to get to.  Yup that one was a surprise.  Unless you have a boat of your own (we do not) or know somebody willing to take you out there (important) and them pick you back up (even more important) we may never get to that one.

But while Joy and Bob were away in California I stumbled across one of them recently.  I'm not even sure why we were on that road.  But there we were driving along, me passengering of course, and suddenly I see the sign.  Curry Creek Park!  Now Joy and I have hiked Curry Creek many times and it isn't where this sign was. So what the actual heck?  Then I remembered that in that literature there actually are two separate Curry Creek Parks.  It's actually one park but due to the high water table, unless you are wearing hip waders or brought along a raft, there is no hiking directly from one part of the park to the other.

So there it was. The mysterious other side of Curry Creek Park!  I took note of where it was and how to get there.  And when we set out, last Thursday for our first hike of 2020, I told Joy about it.  "Let's go!" was her response and so we did.

It wasn't huge but it was confusing.   We speculated that whoever put out the trailmarkers was blindfolded because they made no sense at all.  8 followed by 14 followed by 11...it was really very funny.  And the trails all loop-de-looped so we found ourselves saying, "Weren't we just here?" a lot.   Kind of like the Mad Hatters hiking trails.  

I suspect that we aren't the only people who had difficulty finding this preserve because the trails were rather overgrown and littered with tree debris, sadly some garbage - (an old gold bag, a patio chair with only one leg, a few rusty cans, things of that sort).  

But we were still very glad that we went.  While Joy's pictures are absolutely breath taking, you will have to settle for seeing some of mine:

I wonder where we will go next?