Flashback

I've been looking about and reading a lot of new blogs lately, mainly by following the couple of blog hops I've participated in and by looking for an equestrian related 30 Day Challenge.  I found one, and in looking for others, found quite a few other blogs who have been/are still participating in the same one!

In reading one of them, I suddenly had a flashback to a ride that Chelsea and I did last summer when we decided to explore some of the trails around our barn that we'd never been on before.  

It was a mini-adventure.  We started up one that looked...somewhat promising.  It wasn't the one we were looking for, but we thought, "What the hell? Why not." and tackled it anyway.  Flash forward five minutes, and we're climbing up the side of a mountain. No lie.  Chels and Kit were ahead of Orion and I, and I kept seeing Kit pin her ears and try to turn around to go back.  She also kept trying to kick Orion in the face because he kept crowding her so close that he could have stuck his nose up her butt, and I had to constantly back him up to get him out of her bubble.

We continued for a couple minutes, up this frickin' crazy steep hill thinking, "It's got to even out at some point, right?"  Wrong.  It got steeper. *facepalm*  At that point, we decided enough was enough and for our horses' safety as well as ours (assuming we did make it to the top, who knew if there was going to be a safer way down?  We didn't want to go back down the next section of steeper trail.).  We turned them around and let them pick their way back down to safer ground.  Pretty sure Kit tried to bite Orion's butt once, as I felt his rear end jolt upward in a baby kick (he never tries hard to defend himself).

We tooled around in the woods at the bottom of the hill for a little while, fruitlessly trying to find the trail we'd actually been looking for to begin with, to no avail.  We were pretty sure we knew where it was, but the way up to it was a muddy mess and had branches down everywhere.  

So, in the end, we left the area and went on up the road to another wooded trail that we'd been on a couple of times before and both liked. I think it's Orion's favorite trail to date.  

It's the same one I later took him on for our first solo ride together at the end of the summer.  The one where he thought the bright orange hose that ran from the creek to the well was a poisonous orange snake that was going to jump up and eat him for its afternoon snack. -_-  He eyed it and snorted the whole time after I got him to approach it, then quickly high-stepped over it and craned his neck around to watch it some more in wide-eyed terror as we walked away.  On the way back out of the woods, he didn't give it a second glance.  Silly horse.

We enjoyed a lazy afternoon ride once we got onto that trail, and the day was considered a success.  We had a good ride and a story to tell later. Ha!