What's a walk in woods without running into some cobwebs?

Andrew and I went for a hike today, in half-assed preparation for our week-long hike in Ireland coming up soon. It was something of a mistake...turns out August in Houston is hot--unbearably hot when it comes to hiking around outside for over an hour.

There were shady sections to our trip, but these had their own excitement...

(Picture courtesy of Wikipedia; my camera was unfortunatey malfunctioning today.)

Anywhere there was canopy, and trees lining the path, these spiders (golden silk orb-weavers, apparently) had strung their webs across the path. In most cases, a few golden-yellow strands of web were attached to branches on either side of the path, with an orb web in the middle and its creator--usually they were about three or four inches across including legs--sitting dead-center Luckily for us, most of the time the webs were high enough up that we didn't even need to duck; but it was still a rather unsettling walk, always being on the lookout for webs (and Andrew is hardly a fan of spiders). They're not poisonous, and we didn't walk into a single web, but it felt a little like walking into a cave filled with booby traps, seeing dozens of these webs and predators hovering just over (or way over) our heads.

EDIT: Also, we got hella bitten up. I've got almost 40 bites, and more keep showing up. When I went to bed last night, I had four. This is despite having used bug spray.