At first walking aside the river was relaxing. Smoer took her iPhone, turned one some Enya music and put her phone in the cap of my hoodie. Like that we could listen to the sweet tones of the music while walking. The wind was blowing around us and we could see the moon in the sky. The river was on the left of us. At the other side a riverbank such as the one we were walking on and a forest. At our right side there was a small stream followed by a forest. We followed some kind of a trail we thought was made by humans but soon we found tracks of deers and we figured this was a wild life track! There were some nettles and Smoer was wearing ballerinas but I was wearing All Stars so I flatted them out for her. Meanwhile the sun was setting. It was too cloudy to see the sunset but it got slightly darker. The river bend right and left but we kept following it, chatting and laughing. As we got further more nettles popped up. I tried to flat out as many as I could so Smoer wouldn't hurt herself so we continued on a slower pace.
After walking for quite some time I noticed that we couldn't really go any further. The stream that was running on the right of us lead into the river and blocked our path. It wouldn't have been such a big problem if the sides of the stream wouldn't be so steep and if they wouldn't have been covered with nettles. Further on we also saw a fence coming close to the river, we would have a hard time passing that. We didn't feel like trying too hard so we decided to turn back, it was getting dark anyway. Smoer said she didn't feel like walking the same path back so we tried to find a way to cross the stream. It was barely 2m wide but the nettles made our cross more difficult. We found some branches that formed a sort of bridge over the stream so we carefully crossed the stream.
At the other side there was an unusual forest ground. Normally there aren't many plants growing under trees but here there was some strange kind of reed. There were some fallen trees with mushrooms on it and it just looked all pretty cool. We made our way through the forest, excited about our surroundings and tried to make our way back to our bikes. We soon realized we got pretty far and that we had a long way to go. We tried to stay near the river so we wouldn't lose our way (not like we really would have, there were fences on our left side from gardens and the river was on the right side). We picked up some branches, pretended to be Skyrim adventurers and kept on walking. It got darker and darker and soon we couldn't really see anymore where we put our feet. I was walking first and I felt that the ground was getting... softer... Suddenly I stepped into a puddle! Ykes!
My shoe was all wet. Smoer laughed a bit and tried to find another way around but stepped into a stream? A puddle? We really couldn't see. We tried to keep walking but we soon realized we were in some kind of swamp-ish area and ballerinas and All Stars aren't the perfect kind of shoes to wear in a swamp. We kept stumbling into streams and puddles and our feet got all wet. My socks were drenches! At first I tried to get the water out of my shoes but I gave up pretty fast on that. We realized it would be better that we went back to the dry river bank. Thus, we moved more to the right to there realize the small 'stream' between the forest and the river became a bit larger!
We tried to find a way to cross it but once again the nettles made it more difficult. Smoer actually didn't care much about the nettles anymore since she had been stung by them a few times already but we still tried to cross carefully. Then we finally found a tree which roots were in the stream so we used those to cross the stream. We climbed back through the nettles to the river bank and were relieved to walk on dry ground. It was really dark by then but it was light for us to see where we were going. We were laughing and chatting about our wet feet when we suddenly saw flashlights in the distance. We realized the flashlights were probably from somewhere around our bikes. We tried to figure out what was going on, being a bit scared till we saw some blue lights flashing. Police?
We tried to think if this area was private or something but as far as we knew this was no one's property. Smoer suggested to turn the flashlights of our iPhones on to show that we were coming (since we were coming out of a dark forest). Slowly we reached our bikes with our wet shoes. Two police officers were waiting for us. One looked at us and asked what we were doing there. I told them we were curious about how the forest looked like if we followed the river. He asked why we did that in the middle of the night (it was 11pm by then). I started walking when it was still light. He asked if we didn't do anything bad and if we did this more often and we replied twice no. He looked at us like we were some strange kind of creatures and then said okay and left. Me and Smoer, tired of our wet feet, stepped onto our bikes and drove to my house. We laughed a bit about what happened but we were excited about our adventure.
At my house we kicked off our shoes and washed our feet. I could wring out my socks since they were so soaked and Smoer had a lot of dirt on her feet. We put on some clean socks, put ourselves in the sofa and watched a DVD. After that I gave Smoer clean shoes and she went home. When I was in bed I found a gift from the forest. Two ticks at my tummy! The morning after I found 6 more ticks. 2 on my leg, 3 on my arms and one on my buttocks.This is my personal record, I had 8 ticks! Gross. Smoer had none... Lucky girl.
The day after I cleaned my shoes. They were as dirty inside as outside. Smoer cleaned her shoes only a few days later and her shoes had gotten... hairs... Yuk.
It was really fun and exciting and reminded us how much we love the country side. There we can at least go on an adventure without running into people or police. I really want to follow the river again sometime but I'll be sure to put on some high boots then.
