Crack of dawn wake up call today, got out in less than an hour. We were planning on getting breakfast on the road, but the only fast food joint had a line a mile long, so Hubby skipped it. Meanwhile I spent a half hour at the vet’s office waiting to get the horses’ new Coggins and health certificates (despite repeated assurances they would be ready, they weren’t), until we finally hit the road hungry. We didn’t get a meal until after Hubby’s doctor’s appointment (fortunately we got in and out in under an hour there), but we were too late for breakfast, so a Burger King Whopper was the best we could do (though Hubby had fish). Still managed to arrive at Pennyrile State Forest by just after 2:00, and we quickly settled into a full hookup in a very nice horse camp with a park-like setting (as opposed to wilderness), except, being in KY again, we were faced with look for alternatives to the dumbest highline system every created by a bureacracy. I don’t know what it is about KY, but we’ve seen this before. Whoever does designs the KY horse camps obviously doesn’t know a thing about horses, or maybe they hate horses, because the system they’ve designed is everything that a horse hates. They’s put up two heavy posts with a crossbar. The cross bar has a metal plate across it, no doubt the keep the horses from chewing on it (a habit know as cribbing, for the uninitiated), which they tend to do when they’re bored. The cross bar keeps them from being able to move like they would with a decent highline, instead it confines them to a very small area. To make matters worse, the footing is gravel. I don’t know what genius thinks gravel is a good surface for horses (or any mammal) to stand on, but it’s just plain dumb. So, not surpisingly, not a lot of people in the camp actually use the system, and we certainly didn’t. Instead, we found two trees on our site, put on our tree-saver straps, strung a REAL highline, and let the horses move about freely, completely ignoring the park-provided “dumbline.” We figured that if anyone really objected, we’d discuss it then, but meanwhile, I’m doing what I know is best for my animals, bureacracy be damned. Anyway, we got settled in, early than usual, and we crashed early from all our energies over the last few days.
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