We went on a family excursion to Western Augusta county this morning to take advantage of another day to play. We decided on a little hike-and-picnic, and picked a 3 mile loop that looked like it might be relatively accessible for Tucker.
Since it was only 3 miles, we didn't take the hiking portion of our morning very seriously. No compass. One water bottle for three people and a dog.
Our hike was going great; in fact, we were laughing about the excessive signage. Usually most trails only have signs at junctions, our trail had several signs in between that seemed totally unnecessary.
Everything was going smoothly until it kinda felt like we had been going too long. We had expected to meet our trail junction awhile back and it had never appeared. Suddenly we were at a parking lot and campground that apparently was not marked on our map. We couldn't figure out what had happened, how we had missed the junction, or where the mysterious campground was in relation to the trails we were supposed to be on. Our only option was to turn around and retrace our steps, turning our 3 mile hike into an almost-six mile hike.
The kicker was that when we got back to the starting place, we saw a woman who we had passed on the trail who had obviously been able to complete the loop and had not had to backtrack.
We're still not 100% sure what happened, but our leading theory is that the parking lot/campground we encountered was actually just a different part of the parking lot/day use area where we parked, and if we had just come out and walked a tenth of a mile, we would've been at our car.
The only problem with that theory is that the parking lot we came upon had a bright blue port-a-potty at the trail head, and we found what looked like the exact same spot afterwards in our car, but it didn't have the port-a-potty. Austin thinks the port-a-potty was magically removed on Labor Day, during the hour and a half between our first and second visit. I think that's virtually impossible.
