Evansburg was a new park to me. An attraction of orienteering is that the playing field is always different. This playing field featured a lot of paths, and briars. It was mostly flat, with briars. No rock features to speak of. Did I mention the briars? If I had counted on my two A-Meet courses as good practice for a local meet I would've been disappointed. The Connecticut parks had been rocky and hilly and I'd pretty much ignored the paths. Also, I'd remembered to pack my brain for Connecticut.

I try to learn something at every meet. Today I learned that the route through the briars is never the best. Not only can't you get through them, you (or I at least) soon lose my bearings trying to pick a feasible way. Another thing I didn't exactly learn but needed to be reminded about -- just because a flag is close to a trail on the map doesn't necessarily mean you'll happen to stumble over it even if you're not paying attention.

That the Orange course was more difficult than it might have appeared at first glance seemed evident from the results. It should have been possible to finish very quickly, I'd imagine, especially if you could run the trails, but it had to be done correctly since the penalty for poor route choice or sloppy navigation was heavy. You guessed it -- those briars.

I'm hoping I got most of the mistakes out of my system today, all at one. Going down the wrong path, paying attention to other orienteers (who were often even more lost then me),trying to decipher an tangle of small stream junctions and paths when the controls were on the sides of the obvious, long hill I was standing next to.There were a couple of hashers there who had decided to try orienteering. So perhaps they inspired me because I made a thorough hash of it.

With orienteering a new meet brings a new park. Maybe I'll get along better with the next one!