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A Bizarre (Typical?) Day

While today's turns of events were a bit bizarre, they weren't all that out of the ordinary for a day in my life. Kate, Laura, and I went hiking. They're turning into my hiking buddies. It seems that the 2 things that make my breaks from school vacations are shopping and hiking. This time I have done both!! We went out to Lithonia, to find these 2 mountains I wanted to hike, Arabia and Bradley. Most people laughed at me, for talking about mountains in Dekalb Co., because you can't see them from Stone Mountain and therefore they can't be all that mountainous. True. But, as it turns out, neither can you see Stone Mountain from either of their peaks.

Problems started immediately- a bad set of directions. Thanks to Nathan for saving the day and getting us back on track, after a good half hour of driving aimlessly around outer-Dekalb. We finally arrive at the "Arabian Mountains," as Kate called them, and cannot figure out where the trail is. We see the mountain, but the trails are NOT well marked. We could see the mountain, so we just started walking up it. Kate decided to create some trail markers for others.

It was beautiful!! Much more flora that Stone Mountain! Well, Bradley Mtn was beautiful. Arabia Mtn has been mined excessively, so it looks pretty sad. A fair amount of plant life has grown back, but there are piles of wasted rock lying around, looking desolate. We spent quite awhile just wandering around, taking in the scenery. The rocks all sounded hollow when you threw them or jumped on them or hit them against each other. Why? Are they really hollow? What kind of rocks are they? What are they made out of?

And taking silly pictures, of course.

When we decided it was time to go home, we still hadn't found a trail, so we decided to follow the sound of the rooster crowing... into someone's backyard. Whoops!! We finally made it back to the parking lot, having added Hank's ice cream as the incentive to find our way down the mountain. Finally, I was going to make it to Hank's. Driving back, (a different route from any that we had taken to get there), we saw quite a few houses that were constructed from the rock quarried from the mountains. And, alas, my trip to Hank's is not yet to be. As we headed toward i-20, Laura remembered she had tickets to the Fox tonight and we had to rush back home.

Brasstown Bald, here we come!

posted by CP @ 10:01 PM 1 thoughts