Always Take the Four-Hour Horse Ride.

Anyway, when Jim went online to Action Adventures to see what they offered, he noted a one-hour, two-hour, and four-hour option.  No three-hour.  The four-hour trip involved getting to the top of Mt. Baldy, which sounded pretty cool.  I was a little reluctant at the thought of spending four hours in the saddle.  The last time I was on a horse was in 1996, and that was probably for all of half an hour, on a very dude-y ride at Estes Park CO during a family reunion.  To be honest, I’m not completely sure I actually did any riding, because what I remember is Gideon on a horse.  But I think I ended up in the saddle, too.  So four hours sounded a bit intense.  But hey!  If you’ve gone to enormous trouble and effort to get somewhere, you might as well experience the experience fully.  So we signed up for the biggy.

I have to stop here and tell a story about some friends we knew long ago when we were first married. The husband was British, and they went to England at some point to visit his family.  When they returned we asked if they’d gone to the Tower of London.  No, they said.  They couldn’t afford the tickets.  Now, it was true that they were a struggling young couple.  They were going primarily to see his parents; in fact, I think the main reason for the trip was so that they could take their baby/toddler to see them.  And it’s true that maybe the husband had already gone there at some point, so the Tower itself wasn’t the issue.  Jim and I just couldn’t help but think, though, that surely, surely, if you’re going to spend the money for two round-trip tickets from Chicago to London that you might as well get all you can out of the trip.  They didn’t say, “Oh, we didn’t really care about going,” or “We decided to spend our mad money on something else.”  They just said, “We couldn’t afford it,” as if they would have liked to go but that there was nothing they could do to make it happen.  (I grew up with that phrase myself.)

On the other hand, we knew another family that had (I think) eight kids.  One summer they were going on some sort of big road trip.  So the dad, one of the most proactive, positive people you could ever hope to meet, sat down and figured out how much money he had to spend on activities.  Okay, he said, to the kids, if you want to do anything additional, you’ll have to earn the money for it.  So they got busy and did so.  Hmmm.  I’d actually forgotten all about this family until I started writing this post, and the thought has struck me right now that we never did that with Gideon.  He’s never gone on a family trip and had to earn the money to visit something.  It’s all been paid for by us.  Were we doing him any favors?  Probably not.  He certainly hasn’t grown up to be a slacker dude, but I wonder if he’d have enjoyed those trips more if he’d had a stake in them.  Oh well!  Too late now!

Back to the horseback ride.  That was a l-o-n-g four hours.  Or, rather, a l-o-n-g final hour.  We got our money’s worth, believe me!  I had assumed that the four hours would include all the paperwork and shuffling around and so forth, but no sir-ree.  We were in the saddle for the entire time.  And I was by no means good at getting on and off my horse Gunther.  In fact, when the guys called a final rest about half an hour before the end, I said, “I’m not getting off this horse until we’re done.”  Horses are tall!  It took Jim and one of the guides to get me off when the ride was over.

But, as I said, “I’ll be glad to get out of this saddle, but I’ll be sorry when the ride is over.”  I knew that we were doing something very rare:  getting up away from the crowds, where you can’t go without serious time and effort (and, to be honest, a fair mount of money, although not as much as you might think), to get into some serious backcountry.  When we got to the edge of the national park one of the guides said, “Now we’re in a wilderness area.  If we come up here to clear this trail we can’t use chain saws, since you can’t use any kind of motorized machinery once you pass this line.”  So fascinating!  They bring in pack mules to carry their equipment, as they do when they take up a hunting group.  They pack in the food and equipment for a week, and any elk they kill are packed out the same way.  (I have a certain softness in my heart towards elk hunters, since when I was in grade school a man on our block shot an elk and gave us the meat; he said he didn’t like elk much, and maybe he didn’t, but I think the real reason was that he thought we probably could use the help, which was perfectly true.)

So, even though I learned that the word “saddlesore” has a very literal meaning, and even though I was pretty stiff when I woke up the next morning, I am so glad we spent every single minute that we did.  Go for the gusto, as they say.  And since I’ve also gone on at some length in this post, I’ll have to save the story about my mom and the burro trip at the Grand Canyon for another day, maybe tomorrow.

How about you?  Do you tend to take the safe path, to think you can’t do something that in reality you’d like to do?  Can you stick a toe out there and try something new?