My younger sister lives halfway between where we live here in Dayton, Ohio and where Bob’s parents live in western Virginia (NOT West Virginia), and I love to visit when I can. She and her husband, high school sweethearts, live on a farm. They grow alfalfa, have horses, pigs, and chickens, and kids (the human kind). They sometimes also have bees, though those have been hard to keep alive in recent years.
This last trip I took to Virginia, I left right after work in the evening, and I planned to stay the night at my sister’s farm and hit the road again early in the morning. That evening my brother-in-law invited me to stay a little longer and go horseback riding in the morning. Heck yeah! The remainder of my road trip was instantly delayed. lol I hadn’t ridden in years and this was a big treat!
The next morning, it took about an hour to saddle up three horses. My job was to brush them down before the saddles went on. Pretty simple really.
This is my sister above. I’m not really sure what she’s doing in the stall. There are 5 horses in total, plus one mule. You can see the mule on the right in the photo above. He’s nearly as tall as the horses, though in this photo he’s standing downhill.
This is Max, their first horse. He’s a Tennessee Walker and a bit spirited. This is the horse I rode, and Max likes to be in the front. Let me tell you, there are LOTS of BIG spiders and giant webs that he walked me straight into! Egads!! After a few of those, my brother-in-law told me to walk Max over to a prime branch and had me break it off to use it as a shield. It really helped. Some of those spiders were creepy looking and their webs thick.
We walked mostly. But when the terrain was uphill or downhill, spirited Max would start cantering. It was fun. I loved every minute of it. So long as I stood in my stirrups as he tore through the woods, it was an easy glide. At one point, we had to jump a small stream at the very slanted bottom of two hills. This doesn’t intimidate me too much. When I was a young girl, my sister and I went to Girl Scout summer camp a couple summers and always chose horseback riding as our themes. As girl scouts we practiced cantering and jumping at the same time, and I from this I had definitely experienced a fall before. But this jump was a walking jump, just a bigger one than I practiced when I was a kid, and we made it. 🙂
Here we are, after our return. The others are peering through the fence behind us. When the horses heard us returning, they neighed at each other across the holler and Max took off cantering home. Apparently it was a big day for the horses, as well.
(I promise, I’ll be back to writing about gardening soon!)
The Water Bearer 