After walking the main two-mile leg of the Table Bluff segment and returning to my car, I still had plenty of time for another short hike and started thinking, “I drove all the way out here, so why not see what else there is?”

Luckily, I brought along my official IAT guidebook, so I could flip it open to the Table Bluff segment and quickly see there was another smaller part to the segment, a loop about a mile and a half up the road. Five minutes later I was parking my car in the lot at the trailhead to the loop (I do not to road walks — see previous blog entry).

This is an easy 1.5 mile loop, mostly through a field planted with prairie grass. The trail from the parking lot starts from a grove of oak trees, and there’s also stretch, maybe 300 yards, that wanders through a forested section along the side of a hill, but other than that I was hiking trails mown through shoulder-high prairie grass. Took all of 37 minutes to stroll the whole loop.

With some time left in my day, I went on to walk a loop around the Andersen Preserve in Cross Plains.