Last night I was enjoying some mulberries from a neighbor's yard and thought, "I wonder if I could find other ripe berries somewhere." Whether I wanted them to make a pie, or to put on ice cream, or just to eat, I knew I wanted to go berry-pickin'. So I looked online at McCormick's Creek and Brown County State Parks. Unfortunately, both have entrance fees. However, I noticed on the websites that bikers could get in much cheaper. I had no idea whether or not there was a place to park near the, uh, park, but I figured it was worth a shot. Also, noticing that it was supposed to get up above 90 today, I decided to start plenty early.
So at around 8:20/30, I headed out, bike in the backseat, various containers sitting optimistically in my backpack (along with several bottles of water). I reached the park pretty quickly, pulled up to the gate, and was told I could park just up the road. I did so, and rode my bike in, insisting on paying the $2 charge when the guy wasn't going to make me. (You might as well support a good cause.)
I guess I didn't really go in with a plan, so pretty soon I hopped off my bike and got out my trusty map. "Well, trail 9 looks nice," I said to myself. "Too bad it's on the opposite end of this road. Well, heck. It's short. I'll ride there." And so I started to do.

At this point it may be informative to refer to the map above. Since the colors I had originally painted my route in have disappeared into File Incompatibility Land, I will go into a brief elucidation:
1. The X marked "1" is where I entered the park.
2. The X marked "2" is where I intended to go.
3. The X marked "3" is approximately where I saw a sign saying "wrong way."
"Wrong way to what?" I thought to myself. At this point I will mention that between "CCC Shelter" and X number 3 there had been over 400 feet of elevation loss, including one particularly spectacular drop marked:

WARNING: STEEP GRADE
USE EXTREME CAUTION
BIKER [sic] DISMOUNT BEFORE ENTRY

Well, at the time, I had assumed that the biker they were talking to wasn't me, so I'd just gone down with my brakes on almost all the way, thinking, "whoa, this is gonna be bad on the way back up."
So back to the "wrong way." It turned out that this sign was intended for some huge bicycling group that was congregating at the Horsemen's Campground. However, it is probably fairly obvious that I, too, had been going the wrong way.

Hoping to avoid the "STEEP GRADE", I continued around that loop, taking a short hike at Strahl Lake. Unfortunately, while the lake trail did run past some berries, they were nowhere near ripe. Ah well.

Then I got back on the road. Unfortunately, now all the elevation gain was packed between Strahl Lake and Camp Store. There was indeed another WARNING: STEEP GRADE etc. sign (although only at the top of the hill) and one much longer stretch where I was forced to get off the bike and walk up (which was still amazingly difficult), labeled by a sign at the top simply:

HILL

Which was, of course, true enough. I had to admit that. It elicited a short, winded chuckle.

Anyway, I got home before 11:30, which is not bad. Thank goodness this was mostly in the shade: otherwise I would have been toast!

Which is a long way of going about saying, I actually have something worth blogging about, so I'm creating a new blog. Sweet.

One more note: dinner was a salad of mixed greens from the farmer's market, butternut squash also from said market, homemade bread, and fish that had "just" been flown up from Louisiana covered in, among other things, paprika. And this was not just any paprika: it was Hungarian paprika.
Sweet.