Giddiup!

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Today, Julia woke up with a big smile on her face and said, “Horse Day!” They were so excited to meet their horses that they would be riding for the day. We drove to Alpine, Wyoming to meet our guide at Jackson Hole Outfitters. Our guide, Cole, introduced us to our three horses - Andrea, Star and Twist. Julia rode in a buddy saddle behind Tony. The entire ride was an experience that I don’t think any of us will ever forget. For ten miles, the five of us were the only people on the trail riding up the side of a mountain and then back down. Our horses galloped at times, crossed streams and climbed steep, and sometimes narrow trails. Tony and I would hold our breaths as we watched Maddie maneuver her horse, Star, over some pretty high and narrow passes. Once at the top of the mountain, we took our horses through a grove of Aspen trees. Cole showed us bear claws on the white bark where it had climbed up the tree. We stopped and ate lunch, played for a while in a wide, open meadow, and then headed back down the mountain. Before heading back into town, Cole let Julia ride on his horse, Shiloh, all by herself. After a few minutes, he stopped walking Shiloh and let Julia control the reigns by herself. She was in her glory, smiling her best Julia smile! She had no problems with steering him or giving him a swift kick in the side to make him walk. Cole was so impressed with her riding that he thought that she was a natural and would be running with horses if she stayed in Wyoming another week. Julia sweet- talked Cole into letting her ride a few more of the horses. After feeding the horses some of Julia’s apples, we loaded the horses up on the trailer and headed back into town. Even though we didn’t see any big animals while riding, the girls still agreed that it was their best day of the trip. We took over 100 photos while horseback riding, but we are attaching some of our favorites.
We are currently driving through Idaho on our way to California. Tony is hoping to drive 200 miles today and then find our LAST campsite of our vacation! Yeah! All of us are badly in need of a shower! Tomorrow will be our last, long drive in the little orange lunch box. We will be driving about 750 miles through Reno on our way to Los Altos to see our good friends. We’re hoping to arrive at their home tomorrow night. Our plan is to take the kids site seeing in San Francisco. We will end our trip next Tuesday and will fly home to good old Fairfield!
A few fun facts for you - Tony and I have continued to find more license plates for our competition. We finally found Mississippi, but North Dakota still continues to elude us!! Tony and I have created a list of top six crucial items that we can’t live without on this trip: the girls’ Nintendo DS games (They’ve kept them busy for hours!!), our Jet Boil that makes coffee and boils water so that we can make everything from mac n’ cheese to oatmeal, our Garmin which always knows the right way to go, a small Patagonia backpack which holds water for us to drink on the hot days, our little, blue pack towels (even though I can’t get it to wrap around my entire body and it’s a little scratchy) that dry out pretty quickly and finally - our lap top - so that we can stay connected to our great friends and family over 2,244 miles away from us! A few statistics from the Internal Auditor: total driving time: 43 hours and 14 minutes, average miles per hour: 51.9,
We’ll blog again in 844 miles when we reach Cali!

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