I spent the last two weeks at my parents' place in Tennessee along with two of my horses. We spent the time riding (over 100 miles!) and working on projects. My mom and I volunteered to help with the local endurance ride by marking trails with ribbons on clothes pins. Different races used different colors of ribbons to navigate their way through the park. Here Mow and I mark the orange trail.
We also marked a trail that the 100-mile riders used in the dark. To help them see the markings we attached glow sticks to the ribbons. We actually did this in the evening after I had already ridden my 30 mile competition on Mow--I slept really well that night!
After all of the competitions were over, we also volunteered to remove ribbons from some of the trails. The clothes pins sure make marking and unmarking very easy. Here is my mom on Santana with her volunteer t-shirt.
We picked up lots of ribbons! So many, in fact, that we hadn't brought big enough bags and ended up hanging them on the horses. Here Rabi and I are standing by the river (we did not cross it again though).
One of our rides later in the week included a beautiful waterfall. What a great spot for a lunch time break!
I even brought some lunch for Mow.
One of the overlooks along the trail.
One other purpose of this trip was to deliver a new cat to my Mom and Dad. Here they are with Casper, one of our foster kitties whom they adopted. He seems to fit right in and they are enjoying playing with him.
On the last day of my trip we gave the horses a rest and we finally got around to going for a hike. My parents have adopted one of the trails at the park and they hike it four times a year. They photograph and collect GPS coordinates for any down trees or other hazards on the trail. We also picked up trash along the way and removed some of the smaller limbs and branches. Here my dad is cutting up a small tree that was wedged across the path.
Looks like a busy week with lots of riding.
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