Woke up about a half an hour before the 6:30 water delivery, was up and about right after, packed up my bags because we were moving today, before going to breakfast. Carried everything that I needed during the day out to breakfast, leaving my big bag fully packed, behind. Enjoyed the lovely breakfast and was ready to go by 8:00. Headed out amongst the usual herds of wildebeest and zebras, saw one elephant but unfortunately we were up wind so as soon as it caught our scent it meandered off. We reached one point where there were a bunch of giraffe, and we stayed and watched them for a while, all the time they watched us. It was hard to tell who was the audience, and who was the entertainment! Lots of fun. Stuck mostly to the plains again, fully enjoying the ride. We were out about two and a half hours, then stopped at a waypoint for lunch. Not back at camp but at a place under some lovely trees, where we were soon practically surrounded by thousands of wildebeest and zebra, who seemed rather surprised to discover that we had taken over this part of the plain, and were a bit confused about how to get around us, but they managed to find a route and we got a real parade. We had lunch and then relaxed around on large pillows on a canvas, feeling like sultans of Old Arabia. We chatted a bit, show each other pictures of our horses and other important things in our lives, exchanged contact information, but didn't get any nap time in. We saddled back up again and headed out circuitously toward camp, this time going through more of a forested area, in the hopes of finding a lion, because apparently this is their habitat. Unfortunately, one of the horses shied badly at something, which was rather amusing since they were not the least bit troubled by the thousands of zebras and wildebeests going through at lunch time, but it caused a chain reaction amongst the horses, and my horse Roy made a dramatic step sideways and I lost my balance and ended up on the ground. I hit back on the ground first, then my hip on my fanny pack, and my helmet on the ground. It took me a few minutes to regain my breath and get back up into the saddle, but I can tell that the fall on the hip and is going to be probably the worst of it. Nothing broken but I guarantee you I'm going to have a bruise the size of Australia on my hip. We carried on in the best fashion possible, getting back to camp around 5:00, where I medicated myself with several gin and tonics and an ice pack. It was a lovely evening, a fabulous dinner watching the sun set. It looks like there was some rain off on the horizon, so hopefully the grass will be green and the animals will stick around, and then finally it was time to head to bed. Katya offered up some pain relief cream, which I accepted gratefully, and I headed to my tent, took a couple of Naproxen, had a lovely shower, and headed straight to bed. I'm hoping against hope that by the morning I will be recovering nicely and not be too stiff to ride tomorrow morning. I really don't want to miss any of this, but I'm not going to kill myself in the process. Apparently tomorrow we are jeeping it into a town for the afternoon, and having a fly camp, which will be much more primitive, for the night, and then we will Jeep it back to the camp we're in now, which they call the sunset camp. I'm going to just take it one day at a time and see how I feel tomorrow. I'm a bit ticked off about this, because I was just saying how grateful I was that I was in good physical health during this ride, not getting sick or not feeling badly like I have for my last two vacations, I hope I just didn't jinx it. I did have sort of a premonition overnight last night that I would take a fall but I was hoping I was wrong. Anyway, time for bed, and we'll see how it goes in the morning. Good night my love!
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