The map below is inaccurate, as AllTrails’ UX for recording hikes sucks. There’s no easy way to “stop” the hike recording, and “pausing” the hike recording restarted it after a certain time for some reason, so the app recorded me driving home. Encountering these hiccups in a process annoys me both as a user and a UX designer by trade. These small dents can be fairly easy to fix, design-wise, but they can have a big impact.
The trail was advertised as 2 miles, but the real length was closer to 3 miles. No biggie.
Here’s a more accurate view of the trail, from the Park Trails Web Tool map for Deer Lakes Park:
Anyways, the trail wasn’t too difficult, even with the unexpected extra mile, and there weren’t too many photo-worthy views, except for these two.
The north-east corner of the trail, where it turns south back into the woods, offers a surprise clearing. It reminded me the default Windows XP desktop, which was relaxing aside from the actual view, because of the memories of how stable that version was:
This section of wood was in the western part, near the end of the loop. A little hard to see here, but many of the trees in the area had the same undergrown branch pattern. I don’t know if this was natural or not, but it was a little off-putting. I expected a possessed girl with black eyes, dressed in a dirty robe, to be following us, but no. Hiking in the woods isn’t a natural setting for horror movie scenes, I guess:
I’ve never done fall hiking before, but that will happen in the next coming weeks. My guess is that it’s much more enjoyable than the heated hikes of summer months.
2 Comments
Cool pictures. I agree with you about the grassy hill and clouds. The thing with XP is that it was wide open to hacking, which was also the problem with it, too. I got XP to do all kinds of things MS never intended.
I know a few programmers who worked in very different industries, who held onto XP as long as they could, until something forced them to upgrade. Interesting.