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Well. I had planned to write a lot more and a lot more often but being a mostly non technological camp and lately having activities morning noon and night has meant, sitting on my laptop for hours hasn't really been a common occurrence.
I have been at my camp locale by the lake since June 2nd and it has been absolutely beautiful and fun and sometimes stressful and I may or may not have cried one day when I was running late and I didn't get time to make my bed and could not find any clean socks.
When I got here after my long series of flights and bus rides, I wafted with an upbeat delirium to go on a road trip through 3 states to the hills of beautiful Vermont to go and choose our horsies for the kiddie camp riding program. I took a heap of photos from the passenger seat window..
Following that I lived life for the first time as a fulltime rider (ok maybe it was only a bit over two weeks but shh) I would get up everymorning from my lakeside cabin on the hill cosy in messy bedhair and frog pyjamas
with big woolly socks that had slipped into clown feet and I would soak up my mocha coffee in a moose mug while the American forest birds would twitter under the woodland rain. It rains a lot in Maine but the scenery is hardly plain. For a while we had this mist that would hang through the pine forest and across the lake, like a creepy midday movie where people in log cabins would have dramatic and scary interludes.
When it wasn't raining I was riding, several horses a day and oh god it hurt. I haven't ridden much over the past few years and I seriously walked like an old rodeo cowboy for 2 weeks. The harder saddles were not so nice on my very bruised seat bones.
Oh I also forgot to mention that my life here was now one of no parties, no partiers, no swearing, no drinking, lots of rules at the dinner table, napkins in lap. Me and my penchant for bourbon and my hemp necklace had been 'sent thee to a nunnery'.
The director of riding who has lived and ridden with me everyday and I look very much the same, with freckles,
green eyes and long dark curly hair, we often dress the same by accident and our handbags are the same colour, it is almost scary. Lucky I 'have an accent' otherwise new kiddies would have trouble telling us apart.
Through our nice wholesome life of living in our own log cabin and riding every day, I went on several interesting little road trip adventures. I went to portland and snuck into a bear pub (OMG PUB!!) to have a looksie (wah only looksie). I also went to a Mexican/Irish place for dinner, and yes, it was odd. Several trips to Walmart, it's handy but on a busy day you really wanna aim for a straight in and out, the trolley traffic is horrendous.
I always expected America to be dry with acres of endless suburbia, chain stores and malls. I think that is my idea of what Americanisation was, however, around here is absolutely beautiful, with an incredible amount of trees and pine forest pretty much everywhere, speckled with houses which are also gorgeous. They are log or wooden cabins with old wooden furniture out the front and maybe the few odd bits of junk for the more whitetrash
corners of the demographic. The winding roads between the forests are cracked from the harsh winters, in the winter it is almost unnaccesible from the huge amounts of snow, so land here is affordable, I heard it's even cheap . The stores and restaurants are very picturesque and cutesy also, they are usually standalone, white wooden buildings with high American rooves and the horsey barns are stereotypical American style that I played with as a kid. IncREDibly cute. They also have a huge amount of organic food in the supermarkets which for some reason I didn't expect
A bit over two weeks after our calm consistent life of full time riding, it was time for me to move into my cabin for the summer, which actually was just a wooden box 'cabin' with wooden shutters over mesh as opposed to a house with windows and wood on the outside kind of cabin. My cabin was waterfront and I slept to the sound of the beautiful lake lapping at my ear, the odd mosquito buzzing around. More staff arrived as well as we all settled into the week of pre season, which is where we moved from training the horses
into training our team of riding staff for the summer. This I found to be the hardest part of my travels so far, as morning noon and night we were prompted to team build and sing and dance around and sing and listen and listen and learn and sing and dance and then more activities and more and then singing and dancing and I was dying of complete lack of excitement. Seriously I would have loved to have time to do a poo or something. It was also during that my huge amount of conflicting responsibilities and lack of control over my own time to manage my time that resulted in me not remembering to collect washing and not having any socks and completely cracking it with tears down my face in my cabin in silence before I arrived late to another activity.
A couple of the horses decided to start escaping. Which was mostly uneventful until, one afternoon while at my cabin across the forest and the lake I heard the horses neighing, due to the odd time of day for these neighs and the recent houdini episodes, I decided I would go and check out what was
going on and I hitched a ride with the nearby maintenence man in his Ftruck, we arrived at our cute wooden yards and one of our cute pretty ponies wasn't there and the cute little rails that formed a gate were down.
Oh Fiddley Uck and that's exactly what I said because you don't swear at camp. This was my first real experience of being in the American woods as I was jumping dead mosscovered logs after him. Fricken pony was having a ball leaping through the wilderness within my sight but on his wild adventure, he was now a brumby. Brat features was snapping big branches underfoot and I was snapping littler ones as I went after him. Then I saw what I really didn't want to see, the road up ahead, I was really moving faster now and I was getting closer, but then he did it, up the hill he cantered and onto the road with me now really expleting profusely. I got to the road and he found this even more fun as he cantered along it. This is probably the scariest thing I have experienced in a long time, chasing a very excited, cantering shit
head of a horse down a winding road, so a car wouldn't even see him if it came around the bend. Bad, this could be very very bad.
He turned and started to head back towards me, but because he is a %^#&%&* it wasn't a 'hello please catch me' it was a 'look am going to go right past you to make you more angry.'. Fortunately I have done a lot of catching/herding various horses and various other livestock in my lifetime, so I cut him off and send him turning back into the woods and he was leaping through the forest again, in the direction of the barn. Thank god. Through careful directional herding and bucket o food carrying by my horsey co-star who had arrived at a really great time, we finally caught him (right after I sank in a mini swamp)
And so the next fun packed episode I will tell you about camp in action! After three weeks of working. The kids arrive.
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Sonja
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The ponies look like the toy ponies I used to collect when I Was little!!