Today was an unintentional day off. You see, I originally planned to do my stadium stair workout this morning, and then spend the day planting, cooking and writing workouts. As usual though, I got an offer I could not refuse. Late last night I received a call from a dear friend who told me about an opportunity to go hiking and then horseback riding in north Georgia. I agreed to go with her despite the long drive and an ungodly early (for a Saturday) start.
Things started to go wrong before we even embarked on our journey. This trip was organized through a local nature club at my friend’s school. What she failed to realize was that she was thinking of a different horseback riding trip from a different campus. In order for us to go on this trip, we would be leaving from her school, on a bus, and returning at around 8-9pm. Well, that wasn’t going fly. I am all about spending some time outdoors, with nature, on foot, but not in a bus full of young “adults”. After a short discussion we agreed to take her car and follow the bus to North Georgia. That didn’t happen the way we planned either.
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| View from the lobby of Overlook Inn |
If you know my friend and me, then you know that we are the adventurous, off the beaten pass kind of people. This trip couldn’t be any closer to our preferred method of “adventuring”. The stables that we were going to didn’t appear on any map, we had limited directions, and after stopping at Starbucks for my cup of green tea (I don’t function well without it before 10 am) and her cup of coffee, trying to save some dogs off of the side of the highway, well… we lost the bus. We diligently spent a few hours rolling around Ellijay looking for this mystery stables with a large white bus full of people next to it only to find out that we still had an hour to go. Instead we found some great views, met a foursome of extremely dedicated cyclists who kept pushing up the same mountain we were lost on. Those guys were on 80 mile ride! We found a cute little bed-and-breakfast my friend stayed at a couple of years before and spent another 30 minutes trying to get directions from the inn keeper who knew nothing about the area.
Finally, we drove back down the mountain and began, what we thought of, as our journey to enjoy some nice horses. Ah, we were so optimistic! We were still following cryptic text messages that one of the people on the bus was sending us. In retrospect we should have given up right there and went to go have the best pork ribs you’d ever have. Alas, we were determined!
After an hour on a highway and another on a set of pretty strange country roads we finally reached a point where “the road turns to gravel after some white gas tanks”. That is when the scary part began. The road was gravel, with no guard rail, going up the side of the mountain. If that wasn’t scary enough the elevation continued to climb (obviously), the road continued to get more and more narrow, the potholes became more like trenches, the trees that grew on the side of the mountain looked like they were going to fall any second. We “threw in the towel” after a few miles of this terribly dangerous climb, found a “relatively safe” place to turn around and went back to civilization. It is moments like these that make me realize that there is someone watching over me.
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| Poole's BBQ parking lot. Yes, behind me is a pig made of names. |
Not all parts of this trip were awful. We got the pleasure of experiencing some of the most incredible BBQ I have ever had at the most dingy looking place. The meat melted of the bones, the smoke ring on those ribs was so amazing- poems should be written about it. That meat was something that I could only dream of having. This is coming from a food snob who is not big on pork. We also decided to take a leisurely stroll down a country road after lunch and pick some beautiful daffodils. Now I am at home, after ten hours of adventuring, looking at these yellow flowers with a belly full of pork, dreaming about tomorrow and how awesome it would feel to hit the pavement again.
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