A recent day (October 2) was an absolutely spectacular autumn day for a long ride on the trails near my house.
Alice (on Spot) and I (on Stewart) headed north (as we usually do) and wandered through the sun-dappled forest, seeking out some trails we hadn’t traveled for a while. There are so many trails that it would be foolhardy to try to traverse them all in one outing, so we tried to skirt the periphery of the network. We nearly succeeded, though there were two or three trails we avoided for various reasons (one, for example, goes to the summit of the ridge between East and West Roads, but is too uneven and rocky for the horses).
Here is a picture of our route:
(as with all graphics in my posts, you can see a larger version by clicking on the image, and then return to the post with the “back” function in your browser)
The map to the left does not include the town boundaries shown here, so you can eyeball our route to see that we stayed within Alford.
The app that produces These maps is wonderful fun, but sometimes it does odd things. Its altitude profile, for example, starts us out at 1,004 feet and ends with us being at 904 feet. I doubt that my paddock subsided that much while we were gone, so it clearly took a while for the app to get its bearings. The ending reading is probably accurate. Also, it shows us detouring out to East Road just after we started — that never happened. Once it got through the first half mile or so, however, it appears to be working properly.
We didn’t snap any pictures along the way, but here’s one shot of Stewart and me that Alice took on a recent ride:
We’re hoping there will be many more such days in the weeks ahead before the freezing weather sets in.
