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| Patriot Day Ride, Greenville, CA / IMG_9571 11 September 2004 |
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| The phone rang the other morning and as a nice surprise it was my friends from Quincy, Dorothy and Dennis Miller, asking if I wanted to ride Dennis' horse, Socks, at the Patriot Ride the following Saturday. They had been helping organize this new ride and Dennis was slated to do
PnRs, so wouldn't be riding and they figured Socks could use the outing. Since two out of three of my horses are lame right now and the only sound one is up-n-coming youngster Zini who isn't fit for public consumption quite yet, I jumped at the chance. Patrick was due to be doing a mammoth mountain bike ride in Downieville the same day, so we were going to be in the area anyway. I dropped Patrick at the comfy hotel on the river in Downieville on Friday around 6pm and continued up to Greenville. Little did I know it would take me another couple of hours to get there, but kindly Dennis and Dorothy not only brought Socks to the ride for me, they also vetted him in and signed me up, so everything was ready when I rolled up in the dark, bleary from four and half hours of twisty canyon driving. Ridecamp was at a children's summer camp - Copper Creek Camp - complete with flush toilets and *real* showers. Oooh. The ride didn't start until 7 am, but we got up a 5 am anyway because Dorothy and Dennis are organized, unlike me who tries to get everything done in half an hour. So by 6 am, I was on Socks, discovering that the shortest hole the stirrups could be on was still miles too long. Luckily, this has been happening all my life (short legs R us), and I knew how do instant-shortening-without-resorting-to-a-hole-punch by making a double wrap of the leathers around the stirrups. Voila! I still ended up having to shorten the stirrups twice more during the ride (which with this set up is not easily done from the saddle), but they did the job. This is Dorothy and Elly. We
were making the obligatory pee/adjust stirrups/ I wanted to take photos prior to that, but the
camera was still
cold and asleep  |