A day full of feelings

Today was a long day and I'm bushed, but it's been a day of happiness and sadness. The day started when Rich's alarm didn't go off, so at 5:45am we were racing out of the RV to drive him to a shuttle pickup place. He scheduled a last-minute business trip to Philadelphia. We found a shuttle that will take him to the Phoenix airport for a reasonable fee, thus saving me 4 hours of round-trip driving. After a brief rest, I was off to work by 9am. Today I took the car since I was going to see a horse after work.

A horse? Yes, I've been looking into leasing a horse while I was down here. I've already found 4 places that are options in Denver, but was having a heck of a time finding a place here. I've looked in local papers, craigslist, & asked anyone and everyone if they know anyone. Finally I found 2 possibilities. One lady responded to my craigslist post. She has a horse that she got for her kids, but they haven't been riding him/her(?), so it's a little reluctant to leave the barn. She said I can come ride him anytime, but she's 33 miles away, on the other side of town. Then, a co-worker suggested I look on equine.com, which is where I found Julie and Fantazee Farms, 18 miles away. I went there after work today to meet her and ride a horse. The horse I got to ride, Hawk (painted pony on the far left in the group pic) is owned by a busy teenager who doesn't get to ride her much. I would be doing a "partial lease" which would give me access to him 3 days a week, any day except Thursday and Saturday. Julie and I each groomed and saddled a horse (been a loonnnggg time since I did that!) and off we went. First we did some arena work, then we ventured onto the trail on state land behind her property. But there were obstacles! We got chased by a viscous bull cow! Her horse, which is only 4, was freaking out. Julie was laughing while her horse was going backwards and sideways. I would have been a bit scared. My horse was watching the follies with interest. After about 1/2 hr. we headed back to the barn. On the way home, I stopped for a quick bite to eat and realized I was exhausted. Whew!

In sad news, we learned today that one of our RV friends that we met last winter at the graduation rally for the fulltime class of 2005, died today. Micky is the author of RV Notebook, a tracking program for RV'ers. I bought the program before we went on the road, so I was impressed to meet the author in person. I think he was about 60'ish and appears to have died of a heart attack. In addition to meeting Micky & his wife, Patti in Quartzsite, we also "stumbled" upon them when their network popped up when I did a search when we landed in an RV park in Yuma a week later. You can read about Micky & Patti's adventures and see pictures of them in their blog. When I hear about tragedies like this, it makes me really grateful that we embarked on our Bag-it Tour in our 30's, instead of waiting until later because there's never any guarantee of "later".

So it was a day of happy and sad feelings.

I miss Rich!

-Laura