Impossible as it may seem, I dragged myself away from a warm sunny beach in Jamaica a couple of days ago, and we’re back hiking today. The hike to greet me home, all road walk. Apparently there was 5-7 inches of rainfall here in the past couple of days, and the drive back to Freeport yesterday was extremely wet. We noticed lots of standing water by the roadsides, so were not particularly looking forward to the hike: flooded roadside ditches give us no alternative other than to hike on the road shoulder, which is much more stressful and less relaxing than being able to be 10-15 ft off to the side.
Fortunately the first three miles into Freeport was very light traffic, so even the frequent on road walking was not too bad, then north of Freeport the roadside widened and flattened out, leaving lots of shallow damp areas, but not much to prevent us walking off road. Shortly before the intersection of the new US331 spur road and the old road we found a sand utility line maintenance road running parallel with the highway. We spent the majority of the afternoon walking it, and were very grateful for it. US331 is a very busy highway on a Saturday afternoon, and again has only narrow steep embankments to offer for an alternative to walking on the narrow road shoulder. On the few occasions the utility road became too overgrown or wet to hike we ventured out to the road and were always glad to be back off it as soon as possible.
On a side note, I passed fellow Florida Trail hiker T-Back hiking on the road walk between Blountstown and Econfina Creek yesterday as I drove back here.
View more photos in my Picasa album
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment