The Trail Ride Trip
This past week I went on a trail ride up in the mountains with my friend Dian and another friend Sheila. It was an interesting trip to say the least. ut let me start off with what happened on the day before we left. Dian is having a local guy ride out one of her unbroke horses. Poppit is doing really well and so Sunday she called me to see if I wanted to go riding. I head down to DeValls Bluff and orginally I was going to ride Dandy. But...a couple of other girls came down that were going to ride too. One, Jessica was going to ride this good sized black and white Tennessee Walker that horse breaker Dale had been riding. The other was going to ride one of her family's own horses. That is until Johnny (her father if I have everything straight) got down there with the horse. She was lame on a hind leg. Sooo.....Dian says that she thinks I can handle Chocolate so I get her. Chocolate is a newer horse that Dian had ridden on Saturday. Dian rides her mare Magic. That is after she lets out her girth and has to switch back girths to get one to fit her. Miss Magic is expecting you see and neither of us realized she had rounded out that much! So we head out. Chocolate doesn't rein very well, as we joked about it later she "needs a power steering pump". At the start of the ride everything is going ok. Poppit is doing very good, still jumpy but not a buck one. The Walker is having some trouble on the pavement slipping but not too bad. Chocolate walks slow then we have to trot (and she does not have a smooth trot at all) to catch up. Then we all cross over a ditch to ride up between the big minnow ponds. Chocolate is a bit of pill trying to get her straight to go across the ditch and up the little hill but she does it. As we were riding between the minnow ponds (these are the big ponds where they raise them for fishing bait) Chocolate spooks. I honestly don't know how I stayed on her. The only thing is that my guardian angel must have shoved me back down in the saddle. If I had lost a stirrup I probably would have hit the ground. Somewhere in my mind there was the thought "ground=hard!" Dian hears me yelling "Whoa damnit!" and turns around just in time to see me nearly coming off the horse and the horse jumping towards the minnow pond. The next second or two I get sat back down in the saddle and Dian starts laughing. Yep, that's my buddy there. ;) A few strides later Chocolate jumps again and nearly runs into the rump of another horse. The third time Chocolate jumps Dian and I switch horses. The only problem was getting on Magic, my muscles weren't working quite right due to the scare and she is very round right now. Then we head out again riding off that levee down to one of the roads, across highway 70 and over to the fields. As we were coming across the fields there was a little ditch to cross going down. Dian warns the girl on Dandy that sometimes he will jump a ditch. The way he hunkered down on his back end I thought he was really going to jump it big. He didn't, just a little hop and that was it. Right after that Dian tells me that "don't worry, Magic will walk right through it". Not that day! She jumped it too. At this moment though everything seems to be going good. Dian is working on Chocolate's manners and the other horses are being well behaved. Then we cross the county road and go up by the edge of another field. When we reach the end of it everyone has to ride down a slope and cross another ditch. Everyone but the girl on the Walker gets across without problem. Jessica is having problems, her horse doesn't want to go down the slope and it turns out she hasn't ridden very much at all. Finally the horse stands on his back legs and down she goes, she hits the ground and rolls down into the ditch. She stayed down for a second or two and I wondered if we were going to have to get an ambulance out there. But finally she stands up and of all things walks back up the little slope instead of coming down to stand in the road. Well, the horse is loose and not wanting to get caught. Dian bails off of Chocolate and gets on Dandy and she and Dale take off to catch him. Finally get him caught and Dale rides him back across that ditch several times, the one time the horse jumped it. By this time Glen drives up with William, Rachel and Alyssa (in my truck--it was the only one not hitched to a trailer!) I don't feel up to riding back at that point so Glen takes Magic, the Walker gets ponied back and Jessica isn't up to riding back. So she, William, Rachel and Alyssa all pile in my truck and we head back to the house.
The next day I drive down and Dian and I load up the horse trailer with all our supplies for the trip. Then we go to load the horses. Chocolate will not back out of a slant load trailer so she goes in first so there is room to turn her around to unload. Dian walks her to the trailer door and she stops. The little mare flat out does not want to load, she's not scared, just doesn't want to. So Dian loops the lead rope around one of the supports and hands it to me. She gets behind Chocolate with a long riding crop and starts to tap her. Chocolate gets ticked off and kicks out. Dian pops her good then and Chocolate bails up in the trailer and turns around with this look on her face "she didn't just do that!". Of course that's what Dian thought when Chocolate tried to kick her too! Dandy loads right on up and we head off to Sheila's. There we have the fun of trying to load her gelding Stormy. He will load in an open stock trailer but was not going to load into the slant load. It took a good thirty minutes or more to get him loaded. He finally had to be blindfolded to load. We get everything else loaded up, hay stacked in the back of the truck and get going to the mountains again. Somewhere on the west side of Little Rock we all hear this pop and at first think there is a tire problem. Everything looks ok. Then a squeak develops which sounds like it is from the brakes. It stops. Then after filling up at Dover the truck starts missing! Its not a horrible miss and we still make it up to Mack's Pines. We pay for the cabin and stalls and the total is more than what we had been initially told. Then we get to the cabin. It is basically a detached motel room. That's not what any of us would think of as a "cabin". And when Dian had called she had checked to make sure it had 4 beds. Well, it didn't. It had 2 full beds. And our heat was from 2 electric heaters. And believe me, we needed it those first two nights. Sad thing is that you couldn't run the coffee pot and both heaters, it would throw the breaker. We also meet Sally, a friend of one of the other ladies who was orginally going to come until she had a death in the family. We all decided we didn't care for Sally. Turns out she was 2 sheets to the wind when we met up with her and she didn't slow down on the alcohol. And she kept referring to our three horses as ponies! That wasn't the only annoying thing, she dove hunts, does foxhunting, and claims PETA ruined the horse market, likely by shutting down the horse slaughter. Which is really odd since it wasn't PETA so much as grass roots movement with horse owners themselves! And to make matters worse she is a real early morning person which none of us are. But everything gets settled in and Dian even sets her alarm so we will get up earlier in the morning. And there ends the first day!
The next day I drive down and Dian and I load up the horse trailer with all our supplies for the trip. Then we go to load the horses. Chocolate will not back out of a slant load trailer so she goes in first so there is room to turn her around to unload. Dian walks her to the trailer door and she stops. The little mare flat out does not want to load, she's not scared, just doesn't want to. So Dian loops the lead rope around one of the supports and hands it to me. She gets behind Chocolate with a long riding crop and starts to tap her. Chocolate gets ticked off and kicks out. Dian pops her good then and Chocolate bails up in the trailer and turns around with this look on her face "she didn't just do that!". Of course that's what Dian thought when Chocolate tried to kick her too! Dandy loads right on up and we head off to Sheila's. There we have the fun of trying to load her gelding Stormy. He will load in an open stock trailer but was not going to load into the slant load. It took a good thirty minutes or more to get him loaded. He finally had to be blindfolded to load. We get everything else loaded up, hay stacked in the back of the truck and get going to the mountains again. Somewhere on the west side of Little Rock we all hear this pop and at first think there is a tire problem. Everything looks ok. Then a squeak develops which sounds like it is from the brakes. It stops. Then after filling up at Dover the truck starts missing! Its not a horrible miss and we still make it up to Mack's Pines. We pay for the cabin and stalls and the total is more than what we had been initially told. Then we get to the cabin. It is basically a detached motel room. That's not what any of us would think of as a "cabin". And when Dian had called she had checked to make sure it had 4 beds. Well, it didn't. It had 2 full beds. And our heat was from 2 electric heaters. And believe me, we needed it those first two nights. Sad thing is that you couldn't run the coffee pot and both heaters, it would throw the breaker. We also meet Sally, a friend of one of the other ladies who was orginally going to come until she had a death in the family. We all decided we didn't care for Sally. Turns out she was 2 sheets to the wind when we met up with her and she didn't slow down on the alcohol. And she kept referring to our three horses as ponies! That wasn't the only annoying thing, she dove hunts, does foxhunting, and claims PETA ruined the horse market, likely by shutting down the horse slaughter. Which is really odd since it wasn't PETA so much as grass roots movement with horse owners themselves! And to make matters worse she is a real early morning person which none of us are. But everything gets settled in and Dian even sets her alarm so we will get up earlier in the morning. And there ends the first day!