Beach Trip 2012

What a great time we had at the beach this weekend! The trip down was a long one, thanks to tons of traffic. But we made it before sunset - set up camp, and had nice warm chili and a roaring fire thanks to our friends! The horses settled in just fine in their beach paddocks. Sun up/sun down brought with it horrible stinging/biting knats - the horses were covered with them. Thankfully we all remembered fly masks and Deep Woods OFF kept the knats away. And, as it turns out, Ben accepts the aresol type spray far better than the spray-bottle spray. Go figure.

beach bum - yer doin it rite

Saturday morning we woke up at 6 am thanks to our noisy camping neighbors - I'd be annoyed but they were seriously the funniest people to listen to - kinda like sitting around the dinner table with the Klumps - so they got that nickname for the entire trip. Nevertheless, we enjoyed our coffee and the warm sun, then decided to take the horses out to the beach for the first time.

what is that?

Ben was a champ -it was a beautiful day so it was pretty busy - lots of people, dogs, kites, and horses. tons of horses. One huge barn, Miari stables, came down to school on the beach with about 25 horses. THAT was very exciting for Ben, he wanted to be part of their herd.

Never the less we got our beach ride in - got our toes wet and even managed to snap a couple of pictures in the process.

After a couple of hours, we called it good and went back to camp for lunch, with the intent of having a sunset beach ride. That ride was a bit more, uhm, exciting. As it turns out, Ben is not such a huge fan of high tide. The larger waves, rushing water, lack of compact sand, it was a bit too much. He was still a very good boy, but very overwhelmed, and had some half hearted attempts at showing his displeasure. But, we survived and still managed to enjoy the beautiful sunset!

The next morning, the clouds had rolled in, and the wind picked up. I was not feeling great, and didn't really want to ride at all. Luckily for our group, though, there were 4 riders and 3 horses, so my friend rode Ben. The tide was out again, and the horses were much calmer. It was cold, windy, and at the very end it started to rain- but still quite fun!

We got back to camp pretty quickly after that ride and decided to pack up and go home, knowing the weather was only going to get worse. We had a long drive back with a few pockets of traffic, but otherwise uneventful.

We're happy to be back home but even more grateful for having the opportunity to go beach riding with our wonderful friends!