Thursday, March 11, 2010 - Change of Plans Again!

Hit the road fairly early, though we had long goodbyes with Hank, and Mike, a boarder who had just given two of his horses away to a good home (pasture buds that would have been hard to separate, and one really needed a lot of tender loving care, as he had a heart murmur and poor circulation that created a lot of other problems). Our destination was back to Davy Crockett National Forest, with a stop for hay on the way. By the time we got there, the hay I wanted was gone and I had to settle for some not so great bluestem grass from Kansas, pretty long and stalky, but we were stuck. I had rec'd an email during the day from a client in DC who wanted to meet with on next Thursday! Suddenly, our leisurely, almost three weeks to get to Bristol, VA with a brief stop in Nashville for Hubby's doctor's appointment had turned into a mad, non-stop dash across country to try to get to DC on time. Then, to make matters worse, my computer well and truly and irretrievably crashed! All of my information about horse camps that I'd acquired on Google Earth, while safely tucked away (I hope) on Carbonite, I had no computer to load it down on. So in addition to having very little time to get where we needed to go (and now, not knowing where all the stops were along the way), I also had to buy a computer somewhere along the road, and somehow get it up and running so that it would be useful again. Anyone who's ever done that knows what a time consuming process that can be, even with a backup! Well, if nothing else, life is a serious of challenges to be overcome, so we can only do our best to enjoy the problem-solving parts of our lives!
Arrived at Davy Crockett, set up, and proceeded to try to figure out where to go next, without the help of Google Earth. We determined that we would have to travel an average of 250-300 miles a day to get to DC on time, though the distance between horse camps isn't exactly that regular. We decided to go to Gum Springs Horse Camp, which had been our original plan, but only stay overnight instead of the several days we had hoped for. It was a fairly short hop, but it passed through Lufkin, TX, which had a Best Buy where I could look for a computer. We had little time to lose, so we went to bed early with plans to get up the same.