It was going to be hard to beat our exciting 18 holes of
miniature golf on our first day in New Bern, but we set out to do just that on
our second day. Wherever we vacation, we
are always looking for trails to explore, so we were very happy that the Croatan
National Forest wasn’t very far from our condo.
The funny thing about this love of ours is that we live right by the
Salamonie Reservoir that is filled with trails; and I’ve never been there!
We put the address into my phone’s GPS and we were off on our
adventure. The very nice sounding woman
on my phone directed us to streets on the edge of the city, but before long we
found ourselves on an unpaved road with trees all around us. The scenery was beautiful and we kept
thinking that it would bring us out into a more civilized area, but it just
kept directing us to continue on, instructing us to turn every once in
awhile. Each road we were on was gravel
and we weren’t seeing any signs, other than a speed limit sign every once in a
while which read, “Speed Limit 35 Entire Road”.
I have no idea why they had to say “entire road”, because we were the
only ones for miles!
At this point I started laughing so hard that I was wiping
tears from my eyes. I’m not sure why in
the world I found this so funny, unless I was thinking about the fact that this
could only happen to us. I also
remembered that just the week before there had been a news story on TV about a
couple who thought they would take a shortcut to get to their destination and
they had been missing for two weeks.
When they were finally found, the man had not survived and the woman was
near death. This story was tragic, but
when I heard that story, I had thought to myself how could someone just keep
driving and get themselves lost like that.
Yeah…here we were in the same predicament...out in the middle of nowhere!
Finally, after driving for a very long time, a car passed us
and then a little way down the road, another car. We were encouraged that we were beginning to
see other life on this planet, but just then, the woman’s voice on the GPS which was beginning to sound irritating, told us to turn left NOW. That would have been fine if there would have
been a road to our left. But there was
nothing but forest.
At this point, Dan had had enough and he decided we needed
to turn around and go back to a wider road we had previously turned right on, and now turn left. His inner tracking device had
kicked in and he thought if we went that direction we would eventually come to
the interstate. He was right and we
finally came back into civilization.
We had not walked one step on a trail at that point, but we
were both exhausted and felt like we had conquered an expedition. Food was what was needed (of course that is
always needed!) so we stopped for lunch.
After eating we were determined to still find a trail and I’m so glad we
did because this is what we found:
Now THAT is what we had been looking for...and if that wasn't amazing enough...the trail led us to these views:
Oh...I thought I had died and gone to heaven. It was breathtaking! Moral of our story? The journey you're on may seem hopeless and you are ready to give up. Don't do it! You just never know when you may turn a corner and beauty will be all around you!
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