Archives for February 2011

Cold and cloudy today. Forecast keeps changing, first for the better, then for the worse. Hubby’s eye isn’t really well enough to drive unless we were really pressed, and since we’re not, we decided to stay. Unfortunately, the temps keep dropping and the cold rain keeps falling. Ran into nearby Wiggins to drop off mail, get gas for the van and the generator, and enough groceries to last us until Saturday, when the weather, theoretically, will be warmer and sunny and we’ll be moving on to north Florida. Put the horses in the trailer for the night, since the forecast now is for freezing rain overnight, with lows in the 20’s. Once again, “unusual” for this part of the country. I’m beginning to get paranoid, that the cold weather is intentionally following us. Looking for a horse camp in the Florida Keys, if anybody knows of one!

Had a good night’s sleep after taking some ibuprofen before going to bed (Hubby took Tylenol). Spent the day working on my bookkeeping, finishing off last year’s books and moving everything to a new bookkeeping program, and preparing to do the taxes. I’m waiting for a few more weeks before having mail forwarded, to make sure we have all the tax info. I suspect that some will be late because of the tardiness of the extension of the Bush tax rates in December. I trust they won’t mind if I send in my taxes late, too (yeah, right!). It was warm, and rained most of the day, so it was the perfect day for office work. Hubby watched the news most of the day (the Egyptian uprising), then took a nap in the afternoon. On the ride yesterday, a branch swung and hit him in the face, and making a small cut on his eye, which is small but painful, so I bandaged up his eye to keep him from rubbing it and making it worse. Although we had originally planned to leave tomorrow, there’s a cold front coming our way (one of the worst storm’s of the century, according to most news reports), so there’s only a few degrees difference between where we are and where we’re going. Since here we are paying zero to camp, and will have to pay $20/night at the next place, we’d rather not do that when the weather is cold and rainy and we won’t be able to ride anyway. The added incentive of Hubby suffering, and possibly not even able to drive if his eye doesn’t get well enough, we’ve decided to stay here, even though it’s going to be getting really cold in the next few days. We can always throw the horses into the trailer if it gets too cold. With that decided, we went to bed snuggling, using body heat to fend off the cold (whoo-hoo!).

Picnic Area with Hitching Rail

Set the alarm for 8:00, had breakfast, then packed up the saddle bags with plans to take the longest loop in the forest, almost 15 miles, leaving about 10:30. It’s been such a long time since we had a long ride, but as this might be the only nice weather we have while we’re here, we decided to make the most of it. Our only concern was that with all the rain, there might be some impassable places. Last year, when we were here in February, we had plans to take the Blue trail, but the water was so high that we couldn’t cross a bridge. In fact, the water was up the to horses’ chests when we were still 10 yards from the bridge, and the water was running fast enough for us to turn around. This year, though, the bridge was clear and we were able to easily pick our way through all of the water hazards, most of them were no more than knee-high. The day started out cloudy, but as the day passed, the clouds broke up, the sun came out, and it warmed up enough for me to strip down to my sleeveless tank top, a perfect day weatherwise. We LOVE these trails. The footing is sand, clay, grass and pine needles, or any combination thereof, which means no boots, no rocks, excellent draining for the most part, just great footing except for a very few slippery spots. The trails are extremely well marked, and we only missed one fork because an arrow on one tree was tipped to the left instead of to the right, but we discovered our mistake just a few hundred yards out when the trail petered out, so we turned around. We stopped at the old POW camp (from WWII, when they brought captured Germans here) for lunch at the Horse Rest Area (I’m not kidding, there’s an actual sign there), which was about 2/3 of the way around the loop. There are picnic tables and hitching rails all along the trail and we stopped at several to take a break, to stretch our legs and rest the horses. They were brilliant, by the way, they didn’t seem to mind the long journey one bit. In fact, we’ve gained so much confidence in the past year, we were trotting and cantering a lot, and Hubby even got a few gallops in! He’s been a little nervous about those in the past, but he’s learning to relax and sit more deeply in the saddle, which is making a huge difference for him. My horse is learning to canter on cue better than ever, and we did a lot of it today. A great ride that lasted until we arrived back in camp about 5:00, stiff and sore, but happy that we survived an all-day journey (though we’ll likely be in need of pain killers tomorrow!) These are the kind of days that we LIVE for! And the very best part? There’s no fee for camping here! If it wasn’t going to get cold on Wednesday, we’d probably stay a lot longer, but because of incoming rain, hail and cold air, we’ll be moving on, on the only sunny day that’s forecasted, Wednesday.