The Horse Family On Vacation: Part Two

Look!  Horses on Hilton Head!

It's disgustingly early and I'm woefully under-caffeinated, but I'll try to get a few thoughts down since, well, there's not much else to do on this plane except mouth breath and hope for this ride to be over. On one hand it can be a good thing to be located in the back next to the lavatory, especially if you're a middle aged mother of two (know what I mean, ladies?). On the other hand, the atmosphere can be a touch, ummm, gag-worthy.

Anywhooo, so here are some of the other ways we managed to make our non-horsey vacation a bit more, for lack of a better word, horsey:

1) My son and I were bike riding and he kept trying to ride without the use of his hands, to no avail. He kept drifting precariously to the right. I made the connection that Sugar and James drift right when he rides them, and -LIGHTBULB!- came to the conclusion it might be because he is weighting his right seat bone too much. I asked him to tighten up his core a bit and concentrate on putting a little more weight into his left seat bone, and lo and behold, after a few aborted attempts he was able to ride no-handed in a straight line.

Noah and Sophie riding "Julien" and "James the 2nd"

2) Sophie has declared that my lucky number is 4. This pronouncement is based on the fact that my average per hole mini-golf score is 4, which she says is obviously because horses have 4 legs. You get the connection, right? Clear as mud.

3) On our last day we managed to drag my husband to an actual barn. One of our previous trainers had moved to a lovely facility about 30 minutes from where we were staying, so on our way out of town we stopped by to say hi and see her new digs. As the kids and I walked into the barn we all inhaled deep breaths of that wonderful horse smell, and both turned to me and voiced what I was thinking, "Boy, it sure smells good in here, and boy, do we miss our horses." So we loved on every horse who was amenable to it, offering scratches and nose kisses and peppermints and just breathing in the magic that is horse.

Sophie the Girl meets Sophie the Pony

4) Our flight home was at an ungodly early hour, so we elected to spend the night before near the Savannah airport. It seemed like a great opportunity to see a bit of this historic and lovely city, and we took one of the walking tours of the haunted houses of old Savannah. Savannah is a beautiful city, clean, with wide streets and moss-draped live oak trees. Horse drawn carriage tours are a big tourist draw, and of course we needed to walk up and smuggle peppermints to as many of the cart horses as we could. I'm not a city lover, but I could probably live in Savannah, as at least the historic center smells more of horse (and equine by-products) than of car exhaust, sidewalk food vendor grease, and too many people in close quarters.

5) Plane flights are a great place to read. On our flight home my husband found himself with nothing to read and no in-flight movie, so he leaned over to see what might be of interest in my stack of magazines. "Practical Horseman, Practical Horseman, and Chronicle of the Horse," he intoned with dejection. "I have the US Pony Club Manual of Horsemanship in my bag, if you'd rather that," I mentioned helpfully. He elected to nap rather than expand his body of equine knowledge. Silly man.

So there you have it. How a horsey family manages to take a week away from the horses and infuse it with at least a tiny taste of things equine.

Would be better utilized as a jump field or pasture, right?

Really?? This even needs to be said??