"I hope they don't give me a pony," I said more than once. "When I was younger and went horseback riding, they always gave me a pony, and everyone else had grown-up horses."
Joe looked at my short stature and elected, wisely, not to say anything. He's very smart for a man who's been married less than two years.
So we looked at the horseback riding brochure given to us by the helpful tourist information lady ("There's a bicycle tour coming through town this morning -- they'll ride 37 laps around the town, you won't want to miss it! EVERYONE comes out to see it every year!"). There were plenty of ranches to choose from, but we quickly narrowed it down to three based on a very important criterion: how interesting the name of the ranch was. The first one was the Elkton Poultry Farm, which at first glance does not seem especially amusing, until you remember that we wanted to ride horses, not chickens. We speculated on how large these particular chickens might be to take on riders. But it appeared that the ranch did indeed offer horses as an alternative, and even billed itself as "a B & B for horses: Just bring their food and we'll do all the pampering."
"It sounds nice," I said. "Maybe we could stay there."
"Yeah, I'll bet they get fresh towels every morning," Joe said sourly. He was still sore from having to track down our B & B proprietor that morning in an effort to get some new towels. We had clearly indicated our desire for new towels by placing the old ones over the shower stall, as suggested by the helpful sign in our room, but they were still there when we had returned that night. Perhaps the current proprietor had never read the sign.
"Plus, I'll bet it's cheaper to stay there than where we're staying," Joe said.
"You have to bring your own food, though," I pointed out. "And they're probably strict about what you can bring -- some variant of oat or something."
So we passed on to number 2 on our list of ranches: Mountaintop Riding Ranch. Joe liked this one because it implied that we would see sweeping vistas as we rode at a contented, leisurely trot on our gentle steeds. But when he called the number listed, he was told that it was disconnected. "Well," he said, "they probably overadvertised with that name, anyway."
"Maybe they had one too many guests go over the edge of the mountaintop," I suggested. (Guide 1 to Guide 2: "I TOLD you St. Jude wasn't ready to be a guest horse yet!")
And so we came to number 3: the Keezlenutten Farm Trail Rides. We had high hopes for this one, with a name like that. On our arrival we got out of the car and eagerly looked over the horses in the paddock. (I'm not sure that's really where they were, but that's the only horse term I know.) They didn't look all that promising. Several were lying down (don't horses sleep standing up?), and as we watched, several others fell over, like someone had just sprinkled sleeping dust on them. We were relieved when our guides -- two girls who looked to be all of 14 -- told us our horses were on the other side of the road, all saddled and ready to go.
Joe rode Hopi (an ancient Indian name meaning "Small Bladder"), who stopped no less than four times to go to the bathroom. The rest of us waited with varying degrees of patience for these potty breaks to end. Joe thought that perhaps he was unknowingly putting pressure on one of Hopi's strategic internal structures, if you get my drift, and he spent most of the ride shifting his weight around in an effort to relieve this pressure.
Afterward, Hopi displayed a little playfulness and started butting my horse, Copper. Whereupon Copper, who was indeed a full-grown horse, would stop abruptly and look behind. I guess horses, like humans, can give "looks that kill," although it took more than one to make Hopi back off.
"Copper is really smart," one of the guides told me proudly. But a smart horse is not really what you want when you haven't been on a horse in 10 years. What you're looking for is one that doesn't think for himself, that just follows the horse's butt in front of him. Smart horses don't like to play by the rules. They like to go left when the other horses go right, step squarely in the middle of a muddy rut when all the others step gingerly around it, and turn in circles for no apparent reason -- all of which my horse did, with total disregard for my frantic tugging on the reins.
Copper had a penchant for walking right into little trees, knowing he was bigger than they were and he could do whatever he wanted with them. Apparently his keen sense of space, however, did not include the rider atop him, and I made contact with more trees than I really cared to.
There was also a brief little incident of terror near the end of the ride when Copper, knowing we were nearing the ranch again, broke into what seemed like a full gallop but which the guide assured me was only a "rolling trot." I was glad to get back on the ground, which thankfully did not roll, although the backs of my thighs were screaming in pain. Before we took our leave, I stroked Copper and told him, in the type of soothing voice our guides had assured us the horses liked, "I'll get you next time, buddy-o."
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