Photo Story Friday

Hosted by Cecily and MamaGeek

Last summer the family and I took a trip up North to Greenhorn Guest Ranch. This vacation was possibly the best family vacation we have ever taken. Seriously people, it was like summer camp for families!

Now, I have had limited experience with horses. My one time riding was as a teenager. It was me on a friends horse with a half cast on my leg. Sparing you the details I'll just say this, riding a horse for the first time with a cast on is not recommended.

So here I am at a Ranch where the main activity is horse back riding. Needless to say I was really nervous the first time I got up on my horse. Who am I kidding, I was nervous everytime I sat my butt in that saddle.

The first two mornings of our week at the Ranch I took lessons. There were a lot of people in the lessons so we all ended up doing far more sitting than riding. Many of the riders were just there so that they could qualify for the advance rides (show offs).

Me, I was just trying to feel comfortable steering the massive beast between my legs. By the second morning I was feeling a little more confident. My first trot around the arena went pretty well. However, after the first go around I noticed that my saddle seemed to be leaning to one side. Hmmmm, this could be bad.

Now I had already been telling as many ranglers as possible how scared I was of the horses. I was making my wimp status well know hoping that they would baby me. One would think I would have spoke up right away! Nah, I picked that moment not to speak up about my horses saddle feeling lose. I mean, they always double check the cinch once you mount your horse. Surely I was just being paranoid.

I'm sure you can probably guess where this story is headed. Yes folks this story is headed straight towards the nasty pee/poop filled arena dirt.

It wasn't pretty! One minute I'm bouncing out of control on my horse and the next minute I feel my saddle falling off the right side of the horse, with me in it. As I started falling off the horse I could hear the rangler yell, "GRAB HIS MANE."

Grab his mane?? Are you kidding me? So I did the inexperienced rider thing and grabbed the saddle horn. This of course only sped up my exit off the horse.

At this point I knew I was going down so I just kind of went with it and prayed that the horse didn't step on me once I was in a prone position near his hooves. He didn't. In fact he stopped the minute I fell. This wasn't all that surprising considering the saddle was now hanging down by his belly.

So for the remainder of the week I became known as the, "Oh, you're the one who fell off the horse" guest.

I will say this....the one good thing about falling off the horse was the it gave me a perfectly good reason to stick to the walk rides. Which was just fine by me!

When I was introduced to my horse Dapple at the beginning of the week all of the Ranglers said that he was the funny guy in the bunch. Great sense of humor they all said. Well, when I landed on the ground and looked up to see where the Dapple was, I'm pretty sure I saw him laughing at me!