Horse Camp July 6-10th, 2009

First ever horse camp where CeeCee rides. She absolutely loved it and I was totally amazed at how much she has learned through this first year of riding and even more - how much she learned this week. The horse that she rode was abused by his first owner and so he can be a little bit touchy. CeeCee won the gentle soul award for being able to work so well with him and have him totally fall in love with her. He doesn't always trust people which is understandable and he let her do more with him than even her teacher thought. You can sometimes look at him and it appears he is crying. Really quite sad.

New Friend

Enough said....

Boys will be Boys

This pasture was loaded with stallions trying to show off for the mares in the next pasture over. It sure is that time of year for them to want to procreate.

Lessons Learned

This face: Man we love this big guy.

This is "J" - CeeCee's favorite horse to ride for lessons. He's the alpha male of the stables. Beautiful horse, they had a great lesson on Monday and were just finishing up. Her helper "D" was leading J into his stall when his saddle got caught on the gate. J panicked and started to pull away, CeeCee saw this so she was able to back away. J ended up falling while pulling the stall down on top of himself and D. J then got up and took off with the stall stuck to his saddle and his feet. He finally broke away from it after running halfway across the barn, he then ran out to his pasture.

D was cut on the back of his head and on his hands. He needed 4 stitches but was feeling fine the next day. One other helper was injured as well when some of the stall came up and hit her on her ribs.

J has some cuts on his legs from the stall along with a little swollen neck but should be ok. He will be seeing the massage therapist on Friday and has been pretty pampered for this whole week.

Lot's of lessons learned here for everyone involved. I'm thankful that there were few people in the barn at the time as more could have been hurt and J could have been much more spooked. They've instituted some changes in the barn that will help everyone. It's great to put into perspective the size of these animals and the importance of paying attention to all of our surroundings.

We're so glad that the injuries were few and that everyone will be ok. CeeCee and I went back to see J yesterday as I want to make sure she is not scared of him and hopefully, he will be ok to do her next lesson in two weeks.

Sedona to Flagstaff Snowstorm

We should have known upon waking up that the weather was not going to cooperate. We left Sedona nice and early to a foggy cold day. The clouds were rolling off the Red Rocks. Driving up Oak Creek Canyon (89A) - I was riding shotgun. I to that point had never been so scared while riding in a car. We were on a two lane road driving through Oak Creek - the 28miles to Flagstaff. It started raining/trying to snow while we were still in Sedona. As we left Sedona and were admiring the beauty of Oak Creek Canyon - I started to notice that the cars coming from the other direction were a bit layered with snow. Sure enough the snow started coming and we kept climbing up, up, up the canyon. Now my pics don't quite do it justice as I was a bit afraid to look out my side window but I did try to capture what was below us. It was hard though as the fog/snow was everywhere.

The last pic is looking back towards what we had just driven through. I swear that snowcloud followed us the whole way to Page, AZ that day. We even saw a row of hills that only one part of had been hit by snow and out on the road had been a pretty bad accident involving a car, a pick-up truck and a U-Haul truck. We missed most of it and I tried not to take too many pics - just the U-Haul upside down. They said the pick-up truck had the whole front end smashed in (I didn't see that).

Just one more experience with the weather that we had on our trip to Arizona.

Antelope Canyon - Page, AZ

This is Antelope Canyon, just south of Page, AZ. The first shots are of getting into the canyon. It was pretty amazing. P and I were able to go in with a photographers' pass and able to stay for up to 4 hours. It's about a mile long walk through the canyon. No real strenuous hiking involved. We chose to do lower Antelope as there were less people and it was just a little bit harder. There are no ladders or steps involved on upper Antelope.

It's best to go during the noon hours on a sunny day to get the good sunrays through the canyon. I'm not going to say much about the thousands (millions) of ugly catepillars that were in there - ugghhh...don't want to think about them. Overall, this might have been the best tourist spot of my vacation.

FaceBook

So we have been a bit busy and well, I truly just didn't have much to talk or post about. It has been a long winter and I'm just over it. I did have to join facebook for my class reunion info and so, here is a picture that I just added. Yep, it's my Kindergarten picture. There are actually quite a few kids in the picture that I did end up graduating with. It's funny to see us all.