Happy New Year! Now begins the true Year of the Horse!
The new year slipped in with little notice by us, having gone to sleep promptly at about 10:00 pm last night. Slept through to 9:00 am, feeling much more rested and relaxed, understandable after 11 hours of sleep!
After a leisurely breakfast (there was still some intermittent rain, so we didn't see the point in rushing, knowing the rain would be through around noon or so), Lester arrived to sign us in. Hubby and I had decided to stay through Monday morning, as the location was lovely, the cell phone signal was excellent, and we had some reading and video preparation to do before meeting our client next Wednesday. The entire bill for four nights, factoring in weekday rates, weekend rates and winter rates, came to $58.28. Now that's more like it! Water and electric on-site, a warm bathhouse for those inclined, and an easy pull-through to boot! Couldn't wait to see what the trails looked like!
We soon found out. The rain trickled off a little later than scheduled (a last minute pop up shower reared it's ugly head!), but we started getting the horses ready anyway. Mine needed a quick filing of his front hooves, which was done in short order. Ordinarily we run our horses barefoot, and use Easyboot Epics on the front when the terrain is questionable. There was nothing questionable about the trails here, however, as they were clearly nothing more than sand, pine needles, and occasional mud from all the rain, absolutely nothing warranting boots today! Unshod horses welcome here.
We set out down the Loop Road, which is shared by vehicles (though there weren't any out today). The road led us to the Show Ring and primitive equestrian camping area. My horse had been particularly frisky on the ride up, not surprising having not been ridden for about six weeks, so I took the opportunity to take him into the ring and settle him down. We trotted a bit, then I took him into a canter. When he's fresh, he has a habit of doing a little leaping and head tossing when he moves from the trot to a canter, so we did it several times until he finally stopped his silliness. From there we headed out to the trails.
The trails here are a series of looping intertwining, like spaghetti, according to the map. While there are signs posted for which trails are horse trails, there are no points of reference on the trails to the maps, but as everything eventually loops back to either the road or to the show ring, it's hard to get lost. As this was Day One of riding, we only stayed out about two hours, having had several trots, one surprise canter, and an excellent controlled trot and canter on the road back to the campground, which again, is all hard-packed sand. The horses truly seemed to enjoy themselves, they behaved surprised that it was so short a trip, but we wanted them to look forward to the next two days, which are supposed to be sunny, albeit colder, with highs in the low 40s. Not exactly the 60-70 degrees we set out to find, but this leg of the journey was following work, the next leg will be to follow weather!
Another bowl of pea soup, a lovely cocktail, and we're all settled down for the night. 'Til tomorrow!
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