Another good night sleep, thank goodness it's so quiet out here, other than the occasional train, (which correctly blows the Queens Crossing signal, long-long-short-long at every road intersection). Hubby wanted to try a short ride on Flash in the arena today, mostly to see if his legs are getting any stronger, especially since we didn't dialyze yesterday, which usually helps. I got Flash saddled up, and Hubby managed to climb on using a mounting block with no trouble at all! He took Flash around the arena a number of times, but he kept going back to Apollo, who was standing in the corner. After a while, he started to give Hubby a bit of a hard time, so Hubby finally saw what I meant when I was telling him how bossy Flash can try to be at times. To be on the safe side, Hubby decided he'd had enough, and was able to dismount more easily than he had been lately. Using the cordura saddle obviously is helping, as the cantle is lower and he's able to get his foot over more easily, plus he felt a bit stronger today, whoo-hoo! I put Apollo back in his paddock and switched saddles on Flash to the usual cowboy Aussie, and Flash and I took a nice ride up the Withlacoochee trail, which has a trailhead less than a quarter of a mile from Cherryl's farm. I knew it would be long and straight and probably boring, but it turned out to be a good exercise for Flash, as all kinds of strange pedal-powered vehicles went by us, including one with a little yapper named Lucy in a tiny cage behind her human's head (it was on one of those low to the ground contraptions). We kept off the pavement as indicated, and a lot of the trail actually had some nice trees along it, so it wasn't quite as plain as I thought it might be. We went almost 6 miles up to the overpass over route 50/98, then turned around and came back, completing an 11.78 mile ride in under two hours! I'm convinced more than ever that this horse will make a great endurance horse, he just loves to go go go! We walked quite a bit, especially at first, to get him over all the scary new things, like bikes and benches and picnic tables, but eventually we geared up, doing long stretches at his faster gaits, and finally a good mile or two at a lovely canter. I mostly let him go at his own speed, just to let him enjoy himself, and we both certainly did! Got back around 2:30, just in time to get Hubby started on his dialysis, followed by a quiet evening in our mobile cabin. Another great day on the road!

Got a nice early start today, took an hour less to get ready since I didn't have to load the trailer, then move, then unload the trailer, then load the horses, the load the trailer again, like I had to do at Coldwater, so things went a lot faster. We were out by about 8:30, and since we had had a sewer hook-up, we didn't even have to make a dump stop. We dropped a Fedex box at the office, as I had made arrangements for a pickup here today, with labs that are essential for Hubby to get an in-center dialysis session next week on our business trip to Nebraska. Things were going great until I got a phone call from Fedex wanting to know where in the campground we were located because they couldn't go searching all over for us to pick up the package. I called them and learned they were trying to find us at Wolf Creek Campground in southern Illinois! Evidently, all of the information about being at McCulley Farms was completely ignored, they just went back to an address we had used ONCE about 10 MONTHS AGO!! How stupid can you get??? I argued with them for a long time, explaining that this was literally and truly a matter of life and death, and they said they would "try" to get the driver to go back and get the package. They wanted me to meet the driver at a Flying J 15 minutes from McCulley Farms (we were already 100 miles from there), and it only got worse from there. After we had gone through the Ag stop on I-75 south of Lake City, our ETA at our friend Cherryl's horse farm was 12:30, which was spectacular. I had planned on arriving early, doing some socializing to get caught up, and then dialyzing Hubby this afternoon. But you know how it is with the best-laid plans! We were only about an hour or so from our desitnation in Dade City when I suddenly felt something change in the feel of my truck. I suddenly had no power steering, no brakes, and my battery light came, which I realized meant my serpentine belt had given way, darn it! Fortunately there was an exit a half mile away, with a mechanic shop just on the other side of the overpass, so I parked along the exit ramp and walked over. They managed to drive it over, checked it out, ordered the part, tried to talk me into a bunch of other stuff, and charged me $250 to change the belt, including $35 for "shop supplies," $94 for a belt my mechanic says costs about $40, and charged me more than an hour of labor @ $130/hour, even though it only took about 10 minutes to do the job. What can I say, we were a captive audience with no place else to go, darn it. That episode set us back a couple of hours, but we managed to get on the road and still get to Cherryl's by around 2:30, with me still arguing with Fedex almost the entire way. What is it with them? Why can't they just say YES and be good at customer service, rather than NO, NO, NO and making enemies? Again, mostly captive audience, I guess. In the end, they promised to get the package picked up today, and eventually left me a voice mail saying they had, so I guess the labs are on the way. After getting set up and the horses settled in, plus a bit of catching up, it was too late to dialyze Hubby today (and I was a bit too irritated to focus after all the crap that happened). Our hosts fed us a spectacular meal, which went a long way to assuage my stress, and we finally settled in for the evening before heading to bed in this quiet, and (finally) dark place!