Had the usual routine of awakening, breakfasting, driving, and then riding, but this time, it wasn't raining! Hurrah! And on my ride I was allowed to see some brilliant views (which I very much miss, still). We all went separate ways on our rides, and Anne was treated to a lesson by Hanks owner, an 'old boy' to the max, who didn't speak a word of English, however it was discovered that to make the horse work properly, basically Anne had to do the opposite of proper riding...seemed to be effective advice though. After this, we headed back to the barracks for food and rest in preparation for our afternoon trekking excursions. We all had to pick on the map a place we had either visited upon a horse, and wanted to secure how the lay of the land compared to what the maps portrayed, or somewhere that looked interesting on the map. We picked places in four different directions after much deliberation, and set off on our journey. Becky was first in the Torture Truck (Rob's car) and successfully navigated us all to the top of a mountain, with a miniature ski resort and absolutely beautiful view, which isn't justified in this photo...
After discovering all the tracks concerned, we wandered back to the car, and experience not only orange rabbits, but also a couple of free roaming black piglets (which may have just made my day), and some friendly men cutting wood. I then navigated us to a bit of woodland to see whether some tracks were where they should have been...and they were, however a lot of deliberation occurred due to a lack of research on our behalves as to how wide the track on the ground was, and what we had interpreted the track to look like from looking at our maps. This proved very useful, as we then all had a good look at the key to clear up any confusion, and we decided that the Austrians were foolish in their Ways of the Track. It was then Anne's turn, and she took us to a delightful place, a lovely little house perched on the side of a hill, with a pretty brook running by the drive, so naturally we sampled the water, as we were most averse to the carbonated water owned. This water was certainly 'Mountain Fresh' it was deliciously tasty and clean, and as a bonus, all the tracks were correctly placed to match our map. Then we voyaged on to Sarah's location, where a couple of Senior riders had ridden a few days earlier, and discovered an interesting discovery. This consisted of a sunken road, that was happy and nice, until it was cut by a big logging track which wasn't on the map, at initial lookage, the track seemed to carry on vaguely the right direction of the sunken road. After some more conflabing, we found that the sunken road actually carried on between the hairpin bend of the logging track, and wasn't passable. This reiterated to us that the tracks on the map were generally quite accurate, however there were a fair few that weren't on the map, so counting our paces was going to be imperative for success!
As we got back later than we had anticipated from our excursion, we didn't have a massive amount of time to ride out, but Becky and Sarah wandered over to the river to cool horses legs, and I hand grazed Harvey for a while. We then decided to be extra keen, and take our tack back to the barracks to clean it all, this ended with a very aromatic room, but all for a good cause. We consumed a bit of a late supper, headed back up to our room to chill out and relax, and had a pretty early night.
