Got up a little later than we planned, but still had plenty of time to trailer the horses over the Amelia Island for a ride on the beach. It was a perfect day! The tide was out so the beach was nice and wide, it wasn’t crowded, there was no trash on the beach at all (a huge improvement over the Costa Rican Caribbean beach, which was full of driftwood and trash), and the waves, for the first time ever when we’ve been on the beach, were tiny. The wind had been out of the west for days, and it had really laid the ocean flat, so it was a perfect day to reacquaint the horses with a beach. Usually they’re terrified of the whitecaps, but today they did just fine! We even got several fabulous canters in. This was the first time Hubby had been on Clio since we got back from CR, and he was really encouraging her to do more, and she responded beautifully. I got they impression they’ve been just as bored with walking all the time as I had, so it was a fabulous time for all of us. We spent about an hour, just a short ride to get reacquainted and to start to get them back into shape after the long layoff, and it was grand! Got back to Cheers, packed up what little stuff we had unpacked, and headed down the road. Now, we had planned on going to the West Fire Tower area in the Osceola National Forest, which would have taken about two hours to get to, but at the last minute, we decided instead to go to Cary State Forest, which is just on the west side of Jax. Since we were going to work with our Jax client next week anyway, it didn’t make much sense to waste the fuel getting there, and we’ve been the Cary a few times before and enjoyed it, plus all the straightaways here will be perfect for working on the horses’ canters, which has become our next training goal, and finally, we were going to pass right by it anyway, so we just decided to stop there. The place was empty, we had it all to ourselves, and we arrived before 4:00, so we got settled in quickly, got the horses highlined (which they seem to like better than a stall, Apollo looked almost depressed when I left him at Cheers), got the satellite dish up and running, and settled in for a week of riding, rest and catching up!
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