Daily Archives: August 11, 2009

Amber and Mighty Mouse

We left South Bend and headed to my moms house near Cleveland, OH which was about half way from South Bend to Ellicottville.  I figured we could get a few good hours of sleep put the horses in stalls and wake up early to make it to Ellicottville for the 2:00pm perf.  I had my alarm set for 8:00am, thinking if we got out of there by 10:00am we would be good.  WELL my phone doesn’t switch from Central to Eastern time so as we were pulling out of the driveway (at what I thought was 10:00am I look at my truck clock and it says 11:00am!  Soo once again we were running late, and once again we get to the rodeo during the steer wrestling.  This has always been a great arena for me in the past.  It is nice sand, but can get pretty deep.  I was lucky to draw on top of the ground.  I have run there the last two years on different horses and placed 2nd and 3rd.  I was hoping Abby would pull through for me and she sure enough did.  She had a near flawless run and we tied for the lead!!  We did end up getting beat by one person so w split 2/3rd  but I was tickled to death.  Mesa ended up 7th as well.  After we ran we literally ran back to the trailer unsaddled and headed out to Fairmont, WV.  Fairmont started at 7:00pm, Ellicottville had started at 2:00pm and its a 5 hour drive…you do the math…   We knew we were gonna be cutting it close, but had friends already at Fairmont that were going to try to stall the rodeo as much as possible for us   It is a good thing that people in Pennsylvania drive crazy because we had the cruise set at 80 and we were getting passed. lol When we got into West Virginia Mesa jumped out into the trailer so she could start saddling horses through the escape door in the trailer.  KIDS DO NOT TRY THAT AT HOME… IT IS NOT SMART AND REALLY PRETTY DANGEROUS….but God was looking over us and when we pulled the gates they were on intermission, horses were saddled and we took off to the arena.  I realized Abby had pulled a shoe at Ellicottville, but she seemed to be ok so I ran her.  The first girl fell all the way down and the ground got worse from there.  I was seriously considering turning out when they called my name.  I said a little prayer, took a deep breath, and let Abby go at her pace.  She took care of me and herself, although she did slip a little at the 1st.  A 16.6 won it and we ran a 16.7 for a 5th place check!!  Abby is really starting to show me her grit and ability to adapt to EVERYTHING.