Rowland Rowland Rowland

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I promise to write something somewhat recent on the 16th – for now, you get the post from a month ago that I didn’t get a picture to put on it… Sorry, tax season 

 

The Sunday after my birthday party(March 1), we decided it would be fun to go to one of the state parks near San Antonio and do some hiking.   We got a bit of a late start, what with having to find shoes for everyone and trying to pack some healthy snacks.  We got to the park at somewhere between 1:30 and 2:00pm, and after we got our permit to use the park and everyone had gone to the bathroom, we started out on our walk.

Now usually I am pretty good with a map, but for some reason this one got me a little confused.  We looked at the different trails available and decided to take one that said it was a four mile walk.  That didn’t sound to bad, I usually walk around 4 miles per hour on the treadmill, so with Declan along, even at 2 miles per hour that was only a 2 hour walk.  The trail was in the shape of a U with the finish point about 1/2 a mile from the start.  This seemed really doable, it was a nice sunny day about 70 degrees and a nice breeze.

We had been walking for probably about an hour when we came to a split in the trail.  I should say here that the U shaped trail was made up of about 4 U’s which progressively got longer.  We decided to take this trail because we figured it would shorten our walk around the U it was now about 3:15 and according to the sign I saw the park closed at 5pm.  So we are still fine for time and enjoying our walk. (Well, I should say, Paul and I are enjoying the walk, neither of the kids really wanted to go on the walk to begin with, but it was decided by the parents that it would do them good to be outside!)

So we turned up the trail and after walking another 45 minutes we get to a scenic site that is marked on the map, but this site is only about half of the way around the U.  So we take another look at this map.  It turns out the trail we took was only a portion of the biggest U and where we left the main trail was close to 2 miles, we had walked another 1.1 miles and if we continued as we were going it would be another 3.5 miles to the end of the U plus the 1/2 mile back to the start.  At this point I am starting to panic because it is 4pm, we are at least 3 miles into this trail and the sign I saw said the park closed at 5pm.  YIKES!  So we start booking it back the way we came and of course by this time Declan is pretty tired.  So we sent Brittney on ahead of us to try to stall the park rangers from locking us in the park and Paul and I are going to take turns carrying Declan to try to move faster. 

Now this was not a paved trail, so there are lots of rocks all over the place so you can’t walk really fast because of the loose stones, plus it’s a bike trail as well so there are ruts in the roads.  So I tried to get Declan to race me on every flat stretch of the trail so we could make up some time, but we were not getting along as fast as would have been prudent.  After what seemed like an eternity (around 4:50) we got back to the main trail.  I was so happy to see at least a few other people walking back because at least they wouldn’t lock us in if there was more than one car.  But it had taken us at least an hour of walking at a slow pace to get to where the trail broke off. 

There was nothing we could do about it, so we just kept walking.  Declan was a real trooper and walked quite a bit.  he didn’t give up until about the last 20 minutes.  For a while he kept us going by making up a song we had to sing with him.  he can be a bit bossy when he’s in charge.  We finally got back to the ranger station at about 5:45 to find out that the park didn’t close until 6pm.  So my anxiety was eased about that, but I ended up with some very, very bad blisters on three of my toes and we were all very tired when we got back.

We thought Declan would fall asleep on the ride home, but of the four of us, he is the only one who stayed up until bed time.  The rest of us took various naps through the evening, but boy did we sleep good that night!!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 10:42 pm and is filed under Christina. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.