It has been a rather busy few days.  Sadly we lost another of our lovely horses to a broken leg.  We will miss Bundy. Today we had a few rather amusing rides.  Alice, our amazing 18 year old coworker, and I worked together today.  In the morning we had a winery ride with seven guests and in the afternoon we had a two hour ride.  The guests on the winery ride were a lot of fun.  They all had at least a little riding experience so they were game for a bit of an exciting ride.  The only problem with the morning ride was that neither Alice nor I remembered exactly where the track went for the winery ride.  Luckily I was on my trusty Snowy for the ride, so I was safe and happy and Alice was on a newish quarter horse mare, Janey.  This Janey mare is annoying in the pasture, but she can really step out under saddle and seems fun to lead on.  Anyway, we headed out on the ride.  After we realized that everyone was rather balanced at the trot and had some control over their horses, we had some great canters with the whole group.  Then we took our first wrong turn.  We went up a wrong hill, but we didn’t think it would cause a problem because we could see where we should go… sadly we found that there was a fence between us and the path.  So we went off trail quite a bit trying to find a gate.  Alice got us back on track and we were headed in the direction of lunch and wine for the guests.  Then I took the lead for a bit and promptly took another wrong turn.  Somehow we got sorted out and we got to lunch on time.  We had to do a nice forward walk to get there on time, but the guests had an amazing time.  They said that this was the best trail ride they have ever been on.  Thank goodness they had no idea that we were off trail for some of it and confused for the rest of it.

 Alice and I brought six horses home from the winery and left three for Michael to bring home.  To bring horses back, I rode Star, a lovely little arab gelding while I led Snowy and Avoca.  Alice rode Will and led Jacko and we turned Pete loose.  It was actually a fun ride back trotting most of the way.  Both Avoca and Snowy trotted happily beside me on a loose lead with their heads at my knees.  Perfectly behaved animals!  Pete also trotted happily behind me for most of the ride pestering at least one of my horses. 

When we got back we had to get ready for a two hour ride with 16 guests on it.  Steph and Shaynee had a two day ride out with a number of guests so we were a bit short on horses so we had to bring a few of the older horses out for the day, but I think they enjoyed it.  The paddock only had the extremely retired horses in when we were done getting ready for this ride.  The ride was very enjoyable in the beginning.  It was a great group of families.  We had some very nice trots, and a beautiful canter for the more balanced/experienced riders, then the cloud cover let loose and it started raining.  By the time we got to the top of the big hill, we could hear thunder in the distance.  Every time I looked back I saw the guests faces looking more and more miserable except for the man on Pete.  This older gentleman had a hip replacement and wanted to do a five day ride.  To see if he would be able to do this, he was starting by going on a two hour ride.  If he was alright with that then he was going to try a day ride, then go for the five day ride.  He was awesome!  I loved looking back an seeing his smiling face.