This past weekend I made my ‘final’ U of I trip before my fiancee graduates. Generally, I try to make it an extended 4-5 day type trip so that I have time to catch up with old friends and such, but scheduling didn’t work this time. Even, still I was able to see familiar faces for at least a short amount of time, which was great.
Outside of the usual meals, movies, church events, and such, we decided to take a trip out to Marshall, Indiana. Why you ask? For TURKEY RUN! I had gone there a few years back with my church small group, and its a beautiful hiking trail out in the middle of nowhere. It was a great time just to get away. Sandwiched between rain on Thursday/Friday and a snow on Sunday, we were blessed with beautiful weather for our trip on Saturday!
Now, as most of you know I’m no landscape photographer or anything like that…but I still got to take pics!
The start of our journey -> it took us forever to find this path again!
A quick pic of us in one of the valleys.
This was kind of crazy- how does a tree this huge get uprooted? It’s amazing to see so many massive trees completely upended.
Halfway through I decided to just use my macro for the remainder of the trail (the rest of the pics are all shot with the macro). It was probably around this time when my fiancee lost the map. We walked for about 3 miles to start, and figured it’d be fine not to have a map, we’ll just keep following the trail and return home soon. In addition to the beautiful scenery, I was enjoyed some of their signage as well!
Now, there are about 10 different trails that intersect each other at various points, with only 2 or 3 that lead back to the campgrounds. So not having a map in the middle of one of the ‘hardest’ trails is not that great of an idea (especially after a 2 hour trek already). Though beautiful scenery, this wasn’t just your average hike through the woods trails, either. Following the rain in the previous days, the streams were flowing which led to hiking through valleys of water, climb rocks and ladders, and traverse our way across fallen trees, branches and rocks. Definitely a great workout, though! What started out as a maybe a 3 mile trip for us turned into a 5 hour, 8 mile hike before we finally found our way back to our campgrounds. Every now and then we saw signposts like the following – definitely didn’t give us encouragement that we were going in the right direction :)
(Yep, we did cross that stream, and many others.)
Though a bit longer than we expected, it definitely was a great trip! Next time we’ll probably make sure we save the map though, and maybe try out their canoe trips or horseback rides.
