The 3-mile hike that turned into 10...

So today we decided to take a hike. We looked through our Hiking Massachusetts book and decided upon Mt. Pisgah in Northborough. Now, this book that we have is the one we used at Upton State Forest, and we got lost there, as the book is not very clear and the landmarks it uses are vague. But man, I HATE this book now, because we got SO incredibly lost at Mt. Pisgah! Pissah!! I think the guy was on LSD or 'ludes or something when he wrote it. First indication we shouldn't believe this author: We immediately took the wrong trail which we thought was correct. Maybe we're just really bad map readers and we can't decifer 'trail talk,' but come on.

So yeah, we immediately took the wrong trail, which luckily was a very short loop. So then we start our hike on the right trail. We were okay up to the first lookout point. Then it all went wrong. The book said to "pass by a trail on the right." Okay. That led us to someone's house. So we backtrack and attempt to continue. From what we can tell, it says we should be coming up to the second lookout point. We never found that. We ended up in someone's driveway about 8 miles away from the parking lot. So we head back onto the trail -- or a trail, I should say, because it definitely wasn't the same one the book was talking about -- and attempt to reorient ourselves. Somehow we ended up in some fishing and gaming area which was pretty far away from the intended path. At this point we had no idea where we were going. We relied upon Jay's accurate sense of direction as we wandered in the woods. We ended up on a road which was actually on our map, and decided to just walk along the road since we were clueless as to the logic of the trails and map. We walked about 2 miles on the road back to the car.

So our suggestion is to get a very accurate trail map from somewhere and trust that. Ignore Hiking Massachusetts at all costs because the descriptions don't make sense! Our intended 3-mile hike literally turned into anywhere between 7 and 10 miles. But it was adventurous, at any rate... It's a good thing Pat and Kate couldn't come with us, because I don't think they'd be our friends anymore!