Post #2

          This weekend I traveled with my university's BCM on their fall retreat to Coker Springs Retreat, which is about an hour past Sweetwater. The retreat center was pretty quaint and rustic. There was no cell service, plenty of land, and to my excitement, plenty of hiking trails. On the second day of the retreat I decided to hit the trails with a group. For about half of the hike, I was thoroughly unimpressed by the trail. It was a bland double wide trail, nothing impressive. I felt like there were more impressive trails at the family center in my hometown. Then things got awesome. The trail suddenly cut to a single wide trail, and it became covered by fallen trees. What had started out as a boring hike had turned into a trek through a forest of overturned trees. Eventually we came to a point where we could no longer press forward and had to turn back. On the trip back down, we went a little ways off the trail and found a small cave. To get in the cave we had to slide down through the mouth into the bottom. Once at the bottom we could see that the cave tunnel continued as far as the eye could see. We went as far as we could down the cave, until we came upon a plethora of bats. Turning around to avoid disturbing the bats, we decided to come back later in the night when the bats were gone to explore the rest of the cave. When night fell our return group had dwindled down to me and one other person. We decided to continue with our adventure and embarked upon the trail. As we reached the bend in the trail where we had to venture into the forest, we heard something around us. The howls of coyotes. Ignoring the howls, we pressed on towards where we thought the cave was. After about five minutes of walking, we realized we were too far into the forest and decided to turn back. We became utterly lost and wandered the darkness for what seemed like an eternity, with the coyotes prowling around us, just waiting for our flashlights to die. We eventually stumbled out onto part of trail and made our way back to civilization unscathed.