Happy Trails

Yield to horses? Where am I, Dodge City? The sign next to it said “Welcome to 1900.”
But seriously, “Caution?” Just how dangerous are these horses, and why are we allowing them to share trails with us?

It was a beautiful day today, with plenty of sunshine and temperatures in the 80s.
After spending most of the morning not doing much of anything I decided around noon to head out into the world for lunch.
I thought that I was also going to go grocery shopping, but I realized, after I finished eating my lunch at a very busy, very hot, and very smelly Taco Bell, that I just wanted to go home.
I started to do just that, but the vagaries of traffic prevented me from easily making a straight shot home, so I opted to head over to Super Target, though I really didn’t feel like going there or doing any sort of shopping.
I ended up not buying any groceries (though I did buy toothpaste, which I remembered that I needed, a Sonicare toothbrush, for the sheer hell of it, and also one of those new Mach 3 Fusion razors, also for the sheer hell of it).
Once I got home I opted to take advantage of the weather and go for a walk.
The problem with where I live is that I have to walk almost a mile before I get to the actual W&OD Trail, even though there are various points at which the trail’s route brings it much closer to my place. However, getting to the trail where it’s closest would involve crossing a small creek, climbing some fences, and wading through very swampy-looking ground, so the less direct route is actually the easiest.
There are various entry points to the trail that have parking spaces, but I’d feel silly driving somewhere so that I can go for a walk. I may have to do that in the future, though, as the last leg of the walk home involves going uphill and is killing me.
Once I got going I started feeling pretty good and ended up walking a little farther than I probably should have, as I was really dogging it by the time I got home.
I noticed today, as I have on the few other occasions I’ve been out walking, that there are lot more people who ride bikes on the trails than there were in Ashburn. The majority of people I saw today were on bikes.
It made me wonder if I should buy a bike of my own. After all, it’s faster than walking and seems easier than running, and it seems to be the thing to do around these parts.
Of course, I wouldn’t want to have to make people suffer through seeing me in bike shorts, so maybe it’s not really a good idea.
The rather circuitous route I took reminded me of those Family Circus cartoons in which we see the kind of convoluted paths that kids can take between two points which humorously (in theory, at least) illustrate the kind of mischief that kids can get into in even the most seemingly innocuous situations.
Naturally I decided to create my own version to illustrate my misadventures in getting from Point A back to Point A.



(Note that I was too lazy to actually try to draw any of the events that took place along the way, or include any kind of background images. Hey, I’ve said it many times before: there’s a reason I don’t make my living as an artist. Several reasons, actually.)
In any case, I’m sure that I’ll be back later with some additional ramblings.