Tuesday, May 7, 2013 – Ride Day at Kings Mountain

After a reasonably pleasant evening last night, we managed to get quite a good night’s sleep, thank goodness, so we had better spirits this morning. Those, of course, immediately improved when we decided it was time to go for a ride. I had given Hubby some Alka-Seltzer fizzy cold tablets before he went back to bed yesterday, and that improved him tremendously, enough to be ready to ride today. We decided to take a fairly short ride today, just to get the horses sorted out, and we headed out about 1:00. We didn’t follow the trail exactly, some parts of it we took a main dirt road, but most of it was really lovely. Footing was mostly dirt with a few areas of stone, but not enough for us to be worried about putting boots on the horses, though we brought them along just in case. In about 75 minutes, we arrived across the road from the Visitor Center for the Kings Mountain Military Park, where we tied the horses to a hitching rail and walked across the road to the museum. We spent nearly an hour in the museum, looking with great interest at the various exhibits, which explained the occurrences on a particularly fateful day in 1789 when the local mountain men demolished a good portion of the British forces in the area, and making it one of the final nails in the Brits coffin in terms of American Independence. It was a particularly telling lesson, particularly after our run-in with our overbearing government yesterday. We didn’t have time to walk the battlefield, we’ll have to save that for another day! Anyway, the horses were brilliant, very well behaved, with Apollo especially good since I put some extra padding under his saddle. He never jumps anymore when going into a canter, confirming the problem has probably been his saddle all along! I can’t wait to try out my new bareback saddle, which I would have been using today if horse.com had sent it to the right shipping address, instead of my billing address, which was very disappointing when I discovered it a few weeks ago. Anyway, it will be waiting for me when we get home to Tennessee in a few weeks, I can’t wait to see how it works! Meanwhile, it was a very good ride, long enough to give everyone a good workout, short enough not to tire anyone out too much, about three hours of riding, so we got back around 5:00, just in time to feed everyone! A relaxing evening, and still, no sign of rain!