After months of preparation and weeks of finalizing, our latest book “The Best (and Worst) Horse Camps Across America – Triumphs and Tribulations of Living the Trail Rider’s Dream” is COMPLETE! Having submitted it to the printer, and discussed cover art with them as well, we’re finally able to take a breath! Whew! Now all we have to do is get the cover design complete and we’ll be good to go! Other than a few odds and ends, we spent the day crashing, which I suspect we will do for a couple of days before we’ll feel rested enough to do much else.

As we begin the New Year, we will be heading into our SEVENTH YEAR on the road with our horses!!! Never did we imagine when we left home on Dec. 30, 2009 that we would still be doing this for so long, but it has been more than just a great adventure, it has become our way of life. It’s been fantastic! What’s more, I don’t see any reason to stop doing what we’re doing, it’s been working out so incredibly well. Meanwhile, we’ve been holed up for the past 10 days slaving over the book, The Best (and Worst) Horse Camps Across America. After speaking with the printer, it became clear that to meet the deadline of receiving the finished book in time to take them with us to the 2016 Great Florida Cattle Drive, we would have to submit it no later than Monday, Jan. 4th, so this weekend, we will be putting all the final touches on the book so that we can get it in on time. So stand by, folks, we’ll be out of our hibernation soon!

One of my brothers came up with the idea to take most of the family to see the new Star Wars movie at the latest luxury movie house Cineopolis, so we headed into downtown Jupiter to check it out. It has a large lobby, a full bar, full menu, plush recliners, wait staff, all the comforts of home, and then some. The service was excruciacingly slow, the movie was good, except we had two guys next to us that kept talking and using their phones to text and light up their nachos, very distracting. Afterward we complained to the management, and they were generous enough to comp us a couple more tickets, since one of the servers notice how noisy they were, too. It reminded us of why Hubby and I never go out to movies any more, and haven’t done for a couple of decades, with rare exceptions like this. There always seems to be some rude person or people that just are so selfish they can’t be still for a couple of hours. Sigh…

My niece had expressed an interest in going to the beach with the dogs, so we both drove down to the south end of Carlin park, where they allow dogs, and ran around for a bit. The wind was quite blustery, and the waves had a pretty good rip tide going, so we didn’t get into the water much. Hung out about an hour before we headed out, with her coming home and Hubby and I stopping at the Post Office to drop off some letters, and Walmart to do some shopping before heading back to the ranch.

For the last few years, when Hubby’s lower back gets to bothering him too much, he’s been getting those cortisone steroid shots, but because his kidney function has been naturally deteriorating with age, we decided this time to try acupuncture. It worked so beautifully for our little dog Billy, and we’ve heard so many stories about how successful it is on other animals and humans, we decided to give it a try on Hubby in preparation for the daily riding we’ll be doing on the 2016 Great Florida Cattle Drive next month. After a lengthy interview, the doctor stuck him like a pincushion, then afterward gave him some homeopathic shots in his back, and by the time she was finished, he walked out of there a different guy! He was standing up straighter, which made him look younger, and he felt great! We have high hopes that a few weeks of this treatment will make him a new man!

Though we had planned to take a ride today, frankly, it was just too darn hot! There’s a heat wave going on throughout most of the country, with record highs as far north as New York, so here in Florida it’s in the mid-80’s with high humidity, so not the kind of weather we like to ride in. Of course, we’re here with family, so that’s taking up a lot of time as well, and since we’ll be here a while, we’ll have plenty of time to ride once the weather inevitably breaks. Spent the day working on the book, with an eye toward having it ready by end of the year, and getting it published in time for the 2016 Great Florida Cattle Drive at the end of January!

Over the years, we’ve had a number of occasions where there was a place we wanted to go to horse camp, but water was not readily available. Though we’ve usually been able to solve the problem one way or another, (sump pump water from a nearby stream, bring water in a barrel, collect rain water, etc.), we wanted a more permanent solution, so we purchased a 95 gallon “sprayer” tank from an outlet in Orlando. We had to order it in advance in order to save the $200 shipping cost, but having picked it up on our way out of Ocala, today was the day to install it. Though we could have bought an expensive stand for it, we opted to go the more imaginative route and make a framework ourselves. After a short trip to the Home Depot for supplies, we spent the day putting together what turned out to be a very satisfactory stand that will hopefully be immovable, and will allow us to explore even more new and wild horse camps! Can’t wait to try it out, but it will be several months before we’re on the road again, though we still have a few adventures in store before we leave here!

Busy day! Packed up, stopped at dump on the way out, made many stops in Okeechobee to shop for a variety of things, checked out some hay, none to my liking so that may be problematic when we need some, then finally headed out to Jupiter, arriving around 3:00. We scoped out the yard and found the best spot to park, with our back end facing the pool and our entrance door facing the paddock where the horses will be staying when they’re not wandering around the 5 acres of property.

Once again, spent most of my time working of my Horse Camp book, debated with Hubby a few times about whether he wanted to try to move to another campsite that had opened up, or to just head down to my brother’s in Jupiter tomorrow. Eventually we concluded that moving on would be the best thing to do, even if we had to park in a different spot than usual in order to stay out of the lake that was sitting in his yard. Did a little packing, but it’s a short trip tomorrow (with many stops), so we didn’t worry too much about.