Jedi was good at being lazy with me this morning. He actually looked pretty tuckered out and happy to stay in bed a bit longer. We don't tend to get to bed too early on class nights, so it's nice to have "work at home Friday" to sleep in. Breakfast was spent downstairs on the cone. Jedi did multiple turns to the right for food, but the big news of the day is that when his food was gone he did it for a toy! Yes, we have turns in both directions for a toy! I was so excited by this. Lunch was a quick session on the peanut where Jedi did lots of transitions from sit to down, lots of sit pretty, and a few spins in each direction.
After a very quiet day I loaded up Jedi, Secret, and Kizzy to go use that annual pass to the Jackson County park system. I knew that the Lake Wazee County Park has several trails, so I thought that would be a good way to enjoy this beautiful 75-degree summer day. Depending on how long of a walk we ended up taking, I figured we could always go for a swim in the lake after. This is the park that has the crystal clear water and we really enjoyed it on our last visit.
This ended up being, undoubtedly, the absolute worst outing of our 90 days of adventures thus far. The trail system is beautiful, groomed, and well-marked (for the most part, but more about that later). There is easy-access parking near the trail head. The scenery is great and we saw two deer up close and personal! All of this was completely overshadowed by the massive swarms of mosquitoes we encountered. Additionally, the dogs were getting absolutely attacked by horseflies or some other biting insects.
The misery started almost immediately as we entered the trail. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not really the "outdoorsy type," so things like, "I wonder if I need bug spray" never even crossed my mind. It's not like I had any in the van to save the day (hmm, maybe I should) so onward we trudged figuring it couldn't be THAT bad. We had embarked on the Bobcat Loop, which was a trail that was listed to be a 2.3 mile circular trail that would bring us back where we started/parked. The dogs were all on short leashes, as the park has a rule that all dogs must be on leashes 8' or shorter. While I didn't really expect to encounter too many people (we didn't see anyone), I didn't really feel like dealing with 3 flexi leashes on the trail, so short it was.
The dogs started out just absolutely nuts (especially Jedi) and pulling like mad. The bug situation didn't seem to help anything. The poor dogs looked absolutely miserable. You know it's bad when you try to stop for a picture and nobody will look at you because they are too busy dealing with the biting insects (this applied to me as well, so we really didn't stop much). The dogs' ears were covered in what looked like horseflies and they were getting eaten up by mosquitoes as bad as I was (yes, thankfully everyone is current on heartworm meds). Jedi stopped numerous times to try to scratch them out of his ears, but none of us could stand to stay in one spot that long. Secret was good at rubbing her head with her leg as she walked. Kizzy's ears weren't getting attacked as bad as the others (probably because they are little), but she looked the most miserable of all.
After 10-15 minutes I seriously regretted the decision to keep going at the start of the trail, but by that point we were nearly to the furthest point out and there wouldn't have been much difference between going forward and going back. We trudged forward, but in an effort to outrun the bugs we started to do jog intervals. Truthfully, if you were into trail running these trails would be great for that. I need to run more. I haven't ran in ages (not including agility). I wasn't really prepared to run tonight. I ran because I had no other choice. Thankfully we didn't have to go exceptionally fast to leave the mosquitoes behind. When they swarmed, we jogged. When we hit a more open area where the breeze came through to blow them away, we walked.
When we hit trail head H, I strongly debated leaving the trail and walking back on the road (we had entered at I, so it couldn't have been that far). Along that line of thinking, though, I figured there couldn't be that much of our trail left, so onward we pressed. We came to a fork in the trail and the sign said "Bobcat Loop -->," so we went to the right. Well.... Apparently this was the spot where we had entered the trail, but I completely failed to realize this. It's not like there was a sign that said "<-- Parking." When we got to a bridge, the third one we'd seen, I knew that something was up. I was pretty certain that when I'd looked at the map there were only two bridges that were part of the Bobcat Loop. I dug it out of my pocket and sure enough, there were only two bridges.
We turned around and started to go back where we came from. I didn't even consider that the fork we'd encountered was the way we were supposed to have gone. Instead, there had been a little offshoot trail that we'd passed a few minutes before we hit the bridge, so I was looking for that. It wasn't mowed down like the rest of the trail, but as far as I could tell it was a way out of this godforsaken trail system. I breathed a sigh of relief when we turned down that little trail and I could see cars parked across the road. I guessed that this was the parking area for the beach that we'd passed shortly before reaching the spot where I'd parked the van, so we walked down the road in that direction. It didn't take long before I saw the trail entrance we'd taken. Because I wanted to figure out where I'd gone wrong we started to go down the trail again, but then Kizzy threw up -- maybe she swallowed a bug, maybe it was all of the stress, who knows -- but I said forget it and we went back to the van.
I'd refilled the water jug before leaving home and they pretty much all attacked the water bowl when I filled it. I started to brush the flies out of their ears and assess the damage. My poor dogs were covered in their own blood. Jedi's ears had been eaten alive. You could see flecks of blood in the white hair on the side of Jedi's face and on their legs. I felt so horrible for everyone. They all looked just exhausted and we'd only been out for about 45 minutes. I briefly considered taking them for a swim just to try to wash the blood off, but I figured everyone had been through enough for the night. As it was, it ended up starting to rain just as I pulled the van out of the parking area. I immediately wished it would have rained while we were out on the trail, because maybe it would have kept some of the bugs away.
On the way home I threw three ticks out the window that I found crawling on me as I drove. Because of this, I knew I had to do a tick check when we got home. For some reason, probably because we were all so miserable from the mosquitoes and flies, I hadn't even considered looking for ticks at the park. We'd been on groomed trails the whole time (except the tall grass on that fake trail exit) so I really didn't expect the ticks to be that bad.
Yeah.... If you include the ones I pulled off myself (including two that were stuck to my sock inside my shoe), I pulled over 60 ticks off the four of us. Over 60. I first noted a bunch of spots on Secret's legs while I filled the water bucket when we got home, so I immediately filled a container with alcohol and we hit the deck for a tick search. It was so bad that everyone got looked over twice, and I found more ticks on the second go. Jedi was so amazingly good for his turn. He laid down and let me flip him all over the place as I dug through the hair on his legs to find them. Kizzy literally acted like I was trying to kill her and made me wish I owned a muzzle. Secret only had so much patience, which is the main reason I ended up going through everyone a second time. Best I can tell I got them, but it wouldn't surprise me if any of them still had one or two hiding somewhere.
By the time I finished the tick check on everyone it was 8:30. I desperately felt the need to take a shower myself after all this misery, so Jedi ate dinner out of a bowl with everyone else so that I could get my clothes off (this is when I found the ticks in my sock). I feel like I'm scarred forever against ever going hiking at this park (or maybe any park...) ever again. It was truly such a horrendous experience for all of us. I guess we'll just continue to use our annual pass to go swimming in the beautiful lake.
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