Things you find on Trailventures.....

Obviously I've been neglecting my blogging duties as of late. I've been a bit busy... and by a bit busy I mean completely and utterly overwhelmed by the chaotic business that is my life. Between trying to give all 7 of my little furry critters their needed individual attention, riding Pangea, playing with Bay Girl, working crazy hours at the rehab place, trying to find time to squeeze in trims for my bunches of new clients, studying every second that I am not standing upright, and trying to spend more than 5 seconds at a time at home with Future Hubs, I've not had much time for anything else. As it stands, I am behind on pretty much everything, and even opted tonight to not go and ride in lieu of the many other things I could no longer neglect. As it stands, there are a ton of other things that need attending to - the truck has a recall and a broken sideview mirror, the kitten needs her first shots, and I need to find SOME time to work out, among many, MANY other things - and I just keep having to force more things into my already jam-packed schedule, no matter how much they don't fit.

But I do occasionally find time to take a few Trailventures, of course! I've gotta unwind SOMEHOW!

To my pleasant surprise, shortly ago Pangea and I discovered that behind our barn lies a veritable labyrinth of old roadwork and a failed housing development, which has left the inhabitants of our barn with a nice network of forge-your-own-path trails and a few large fields for trot and canterwork. We've been out there once or twice, and it was utterly gorgeous. Now that the weather is deteriorating in anticipation of the miserable summer months to come (it's been in the 90's every day and climbing... and this is only the beginning of the end), our rides have to take place at the very end of the day as things are cooling down. It won't be long before temperatures climb into the triple digits and stay there, and the evenings don't cool down until 10 or 11 at night when it gets that hot. When that happens, we'll have no choice but to start riding in the wee morning hours before work begins at 7:30am. Seeing as this will mean leaving my house at around 4:00am at the latest, I'm not too keen for it to begin.

Pangea might have been having a really bad hair day, but she sure looks good in my jump tack!





The trails were beautiful the other night....






... and I was almost reminded of all our old evening rides in New England. I let myself fall back into sweet memory, and it was almost like I could pretend that I was far from Texas and back in my beloved Baxster Road in New York.

Until, of course, we saw these:





Oh Texas, lest we forget... you will surely remind us.

When we first saw the cows, Pangea stopped and looked quizzically at them. The cows turned, saw us, and of course all started RUNNING AS FAST AS THEY COULD right at us. (Not that longhorns run fast... but they are pretty terrifying when they are coming right for you.) I thought for sure Pangea's heart was going to fall out of her chest from banging so hard. You could visibly see her entire body vibrating with every beat. Thankfully, the cows were somewhat safely contained behind a little tiny piece of barbed wire, and we were able to make a safe getaway.



The things you find on Trailventures around here never fail to surprise me day after day. You think charging longhorns are surprising? Check out these other (rather graphic and disgusting) finds that I've stumbled across while out riding on other horses:








Gross, no? I want to know where all of these things COME from... there haven't been animals out in these pastures for months and months! The dead calf, however, does have an interesting story. There is an abandoned farm house in the adjoining property next to the rehab place, which had a cute little 3-stall barn and tack room in it. Being curious folks, we decided to scope it out and see what it looked like from the inside. That kind of went a little like this: "awww, a foaling stall! Awww, look at these two other nice stalls with runs off of them! How cute! Aww, the tack room.... EWWWW OMG EWW AHHH EWW!" Yep, there was a dead calf IN the TACK ROOM with the door shut. HOW in the heck did it get in THERE? We can only guess that it wandered in, bumped the door shut, and could never get out again, poor thing.

The property owners decided to tear the barn down a week or two ago, and it was about that time that the dogs started bringing home pieces of cow legs to chew on. (How tasty.) We found several legs, a skull, and a pelvis, all very fresh and moist despite the fact that the coyotes had already stripped off the meat. "This must be the tack room cow!" I thought to myself, even though I vaguely thought I remembered that the tack room cow was tan, and the legs brought back were black. The tack room cow had also been dead for nearly a year, locked away in the tack room... this one looked so, well, juicy and fresh. (Urp.)

And apparently, my instincts were right - I later found the REAL tack room cow, where they had dragged it when they had dismantled the barn. So the question is, where in the heck did the FRESH calf come from?

The world may never know.