After the Deer Enclosure, we hiked our last trail of the park, Black Oak Trail.
The park's guide book calls Black Oak Trail a "pleasant jaunt" and "an excellent trail for watching songbirds". We found it to be neither.
Black Oak Trail was an interesting enough trail, but we didn't see any birds or stop to take any pictures. The lack of birds, again, may have been due to the storm blowing through. The lack of pictures certainly was. The sky had darkened such that the lighting wasn't good for taking photographs with our minimalist equipment, and it had started to rain. Laura loves the rain, as some of you may know, but we were in a thickly forested area and the skies were threatening to rain hard. We wanted to get off the trail before that happened.
As for the "pleasant" part, let me say this: If you are an arachnophobe, Black Oak Trail is not for you!
Laura and I have nothing against spiders per se. We've seen some interesting ones here in Rondeau Park and even taken a few snapshots of them. The problem with Black Oak Trail was that it obviously hadn't been as well travelled by humans in recent days as the other trails had been. I was short enought to pass beneath most of the spider webs that crossed the path, but Laura grew tired of constantly breaking them with her face and took to waving a stick up and down in front of her as she walked to clear our passage.
Maybe someday, when it is sunnier and we are well rested and have more time to devote to exploring, Laura and I will give Black Oak Trail another go, but on this trip, we were glad to be rid of it, scrape the spider silk out of our hair and eyes, and head back to Oak Grove.
The winds were still raging when we made it back to camp, so Laura didn't even attempt to start a fire. We had a cold dinner, Laura taking her pesto with whole wheat pita bread and Lancashire cheese, and went to bed.
The rain clouds blew over quickly but the high winds continued to rage well into the night and long after we had fallen asleep.
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