living in a guest house

Today we got out of work rather early.  It was a fantastic day at work again, a bit overcast and rainy (thank goodness… it gave me another day I could worry less about getting sunburnt) but still plenty warm.  Today I had a rather unexciting ride on a nice chestnut mare named Avoca (or something like that).  She was a perfectly fine ride, but there is no real spunk in here.  She has absolutely no buck, no real motivation to do anything other than what the horse in front of her is doing.  A bit dull, but a safe ride.  Today we just had a 2 hour ride, and then we oiled some saddles.  Easy day!

When we got home from work today the guests had left so we had the place to ourselves again.  I should clarify here.  Steph (my coworker from Yellowstone) and I are staying at a guest house lodge like place not very far from the stable.  It is amazing and our landlord is great.  He had six guests this weekend and they were great fun.  They actually ended up going on a winery ride with us yesterday.  But anyway, with the guests leaving, our lovely landlord left us all of the food he had left from them.  It is probably about a week’s worth of food for the two of us.  Everyone here really seems to be looking out for us, making sure we get enough to eat and whatnot. 

I just realized that I left out two big days that we were here.  On the second and third day of work, I went on a two day luxury ride!  Our coworker who actually brought me out here, Shaynee, was sick so both Steph and I had to work this trip.  The ride was outstanding.  I rode Snowy both days.  Wow, I love that gelding.  The first day we rode out, then stopped a few hours into the ride for lunch.  Sally, one of the owners of the business, brought lunch out to us.  It was a splendid variety of veggies, meats, and cheese to make wraps.  Then we got back in the saddle for the second half of the ride.   As we left there, I was told that my horse may have never crossed streams before.  Of course, we then crossed the stream about 20 times.  Snowy jumped it wonderfully every time.  At one point the stream was rather wide followed by a good bit of brush, so Snowy of course went over it in one large leap.  I was laughing my head off after that one.  We also had to cross the river a number of times.  It was rather fun to have the horses almost take us swimming.  When we got to the accomidation for the night, it turned out to be the guest house of one of my friends from a packtrip this summer.  It was great to see Sara again and her place was amazing!  There was a nice large paddock for the horses and plenty of rooms for all of us.  Of course she also had a swimming pool for us to play in.  On this trip Steph and I also had to make dinner, so we had to grill marinated steak and chicken.  It was outstanding!  We actually didn’t screw it up!  Everyone loved dinner and everyone pitched in to get everything done. 

The next morning Steph had to leave to lead day rides, so I got to cook breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast, and fried tomatoes.  It was a great breakfast (at least I think so).  On the ride back I worked on my horseback gate opening skills.  Sometimes Snowy got a little riled up from it, but he was overall great.  We had the most amazing canter on the way back.  We were going uphill and I was in charge of the second group, so we did a rather fast canter up a rocky hill.  The wind was lovely in my face and the sound of horses hooves surrounded all of us.  Dirt was flying and the horses were snorting.  Snowy has the most amazing stride, so when I needed to slow down to motivate one of my riders to get back into the canter when the broke into the trot, Snowy would slow and collect his canter to a beautiful comfortable gait.