We came, we rode, we got soaking wet, we had a blast

What did not occur until we were done with our ride

I've mellowed considerably since my last post. Mainly because I went for a ride. Though politics are quickly intruding on my equine chill.

The weather reports for this weekend were awful, the Hunt Pace that I had planned on going to got delayed to next weekend, so I'm really not going to it because I'll be at Oak Leaf Run. And suddenly that's fine.

I instead thought I'd do Brighton to Pinckney. But that got moved to next weekend and I'll be at Oak Leaf (seeing a pattern?)

Suddenly not having anything I was looking forward to doing more than Oak Leaf has made life okay. Instead, I pestered Alicia (ok, not really, she's an easy sell) to see if she wanted to ride Saturday. The weather report showed a small break in the percentage chance of rain starting at 9am and I was damned if I was going to miss that window.

We ultimately decided on meeting at Ortonville Rec Area, which would be nice and wooded. And with the weather cooling off, the bugs would be gone (but not mosquitoes). I had to drive my Mom down to Brighton early that morning so I pretty much drove down there and back, then immediately hooked the truck and trailer up and worked on loading Gwyn.

Gwyn, was a jerk.

She found the ONE spot where my 'load up quick' fence was not fully blocked (and honestly I didn't realize it wasn't fully connected) and escaped to gallivant across the property. I had been forward thinking and was wearing my rain boots so I didn't get too wet. Eric noticed I was having trouble and came out just in time to see me finally get Gwyn loaded and standing still. He was highly amused at her ability to turn around in my straight load. She's ridiculously flexible for how large she is. I was not nearly as amused because my ramp was starting to get slick from poop skids and I had fallen.

I finally got on the road and it started to rain in earnest. I met Alicia at the camping lot and we both got out and went... 'Um... is that thunder?'

So we waited out the lightning and thunder under the pavilion without unloading the horses while Alicia made reins out of rope because she'd forgotten hers (but at least not her girth...)

With the most dangerous part of the storm over but the rain still insisting on falling, we unloaded and tacked up.

And then proceeded to ride for an hour and forty minutes. LOL.  It did stop raining as soon as we got on, but the branches above us shaking dripped water the whole time. And then 40 minutes in the skies opened up again and we just embraced the rain. It was wonderful. It wasn't too cold, high 60s and I did have my rain jacket so I wasn't utterly soaked though my saddle will need some TLC for sure. We did a ton of hills, but mostly stuck to a walk because the trails had a ridiculous number of plum and baseball sized rocks. We had to pick our way carefully up and down.

Gwyn had some.. moments. One of which was her spooking at a leaf landing on her butt. Another was a small buck while walking down hill because a fallen clump of leaves touched her leg. We were laughing SO HARD.

And since it got cut off, 6.13 miles in 1h43m, 1800 calories burned

We got back and the skies cleared up, LOL.  We both immediately tossed coolers on the horses and let them graze and cool. They were both steaming.  It was a great day. I'm glad I did it. Doing this loop is GREAT for hills. It'll be good conditioning and I intend to repeat it even solo through the winter.

It was good for my soul.

And then I went home and took a nap.