It is American Thanksgiving today. The state park we are in is full of motorhomes, trailers, and 5th wheels. Several of them seemed to have deep fryers for turkeys set up. I could smell turkey cooking in the campsite tonight. We didn’t have turkey, but we did have barbequed chicken and pumpkin pie with ice cream for dessert.
David cycling on the 50 Year Trail, Catalina State Park
We felt that we could afford the calories in the pie today, since we cycled and hiked (admittedly not all that far, but …) We started riding on the “50 Year Trail” which is marked in our trail guide that we got from the park as “easy”. Well, it would be a fairly easy hike, but it was not an easy bike. The trail is very rocky and rough, and where there weren’t rocks, it was loose sand. It was also uphill most of the way (of course that meant it was down coming back). We got a few kilometers along the trail, and decided it was just way too hard for our liking, so we locked our bikes together and left them by the side of the trail.
Then we hiked for another 3 kilometers to a high spot where we ate our lunch. We met another couple that were also hiking, somewhat older than us, and the man said that he used to ride the trail, but didn’t anymore as it was just too hard. He said on biking maps this trail is listed as medium to extreme mountain biking! We also saw a couple of people riding horses.
While hiking back to our bikes we met a couple more cyclists. One of them was slightly older than me, and was having a very hard time keeping up to his younger (fortyish) son. They both passed us after we’d got back to our bikes and started riding downhill. The son went whipping by Enid with no warning, so fortunately the trail was wide enough at that point, or either he or Enid could have gone for a spill. We could see why we became so tired going in, for on the way back it was obvious that the trail went downhill all the way from where we had stopped.