Hey Darlin’,
Even though it was a later alarm this morning, I still woke up early, though I didn’t get up for awhile. I started packing up when I saw Lynda and Wendy leaving already at 7:30, which was way earlier than I thought we would have to leave, but I was worried about parking, so I quick finished packing and headed out as close behind them as I could. Wendy saved me a spot but it was on the grass, and we had been worned that the grassy areas were soft so I passed by, also because there were trailers come in after me and I didn’t want to block the entrance backing into that spot. As it turned out, I moved over there afterward anyway, which turned out to be the perfect thing to do. I got Flash ready, and ironed my red, white and blue parade shirt, and eventually was ready to go, even though no time had still been announced, or set, as far as I could tell. Crazy! Eventually the wagons started moving out around 10:00, and I ended up hooking up with Augie again, his mare Apolonia and Flash have a very similar look and make a good-looking team, even though she does the fino footwork better than Flash (probably because I don’t make him, he could certainly do it if I tried), and we stayed together for the entire parade route. Flash behaved remarkably well, he had gotten very used to all the whip-cracking that’s been going on, but then suddenly the mounted shooters starting firing their guns, and he was a little startled by that. It would have been nice if they had done a little of that to desensitize the horses in camp, it came as a complete surprise to me that they were doing that during the parade, but Flash recovered well and soon learned to almost ignore it. After parading around twice, we went back to the parking area, then some of us had planned to go to lunch by the pier, and we got lots of attention there. Wendy had actually tied up her horse and gone up to what looked like a really nice restaurant right on the water to reserve a table, because we thought that’s where we were having lunch, but the men talked Lynda into going to some tiki dive bar that had previously put out water and hitching posts for the horses, so we headed down there. What a mistake that was! The tiki bar they went to hadn’t done anything like that, and didn’t even serve food, just drinks, and since the three of us were hungry, we ended up walking to another tiki bar that did serve food, but because there was some kind of event (not us), the menu had very limited choices. I ordered a hamburger, which I quickly discovered had a long black hair in it, and had to sent it back, so I ended up hurrying through lunch because mine came so much later. We made out way back to the trailers and loaded up, then Flash did something weird and knocked me over and ended up stepping on my calf, so I’m going to have a huge bruise there. I managed to get through the whole week relatively unscathed only to end up with a sore leg after it’s all over! Once we got going, we drove over to Causeway Cove, and spacious campground right on the intracoastal, got set up, then I changed into my bathing suit and the three of us rode down to the boat ramp, along the beach, and out into the deeper water and went swimming. It only took a short time to get Flash into the water, and he actually got deep enough to swim a bit, then we just stood in the water to let the benefits of the salt water kick in. The water was nice and warm and everybody was pretty well behaved, though Flash wasn’t as still as I would have liked. We got back to the trailers, I did some mending, then took a shower, and then was expecting to go to dinner with the other two, but missed them because my phone was in the truck when Wendy texted me, so I ended up doing ramen shrimp for dinner instead. Settled down for the evening, now I’m heading to bed fairly early to read a bit. Kind of tired of “camping” next to busy roads and wearing earplugs like I have been for the past month, looking forward to getting away from all this noise once I get back on the road again! Anyway, that’s all the news that’s fit to print, the point being, CRACKER RIDE DONE and checked off the bucket list! I’m off to bed! Good night, my darlin’! Love you!
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