Feb 9 - Preparations!

Hello!  My name is Mary Spence, and together with my friend Cindy Shaw, and her two Paso Fino horses, Blondie and Sombra, we are about to embark on a grand adventure!  We will be riding horses across the State of Florida!  We start just south of Tampa and finish in Ft. Pierce.  Its a week of 5-8 hour days in the saddle in whatever weather conditions we encounter!  The final day in Ft. Pierce is a big parade!

Cindy and I have been training the horses with trail rides every weekend for the last few months and the mares are both ready!  Our butts are ready too as we suddenly noticed that we were no longer sore after our weekend excursions!  The horses are also ready for the water crossings, and wet trails, which took some training!  Cindy and her husband John have done a ton of work on the trailer to get it prepared for this trip as we will "leap frog" the trailers ahead at lunch every day and sleep in the trailer at night with the horses tied up outside.  We are hoping that the final caulking and patching on the trailer has fixed all the leaks!  We shall see!

Here is how the leap frog works....we ride out at 8am every morning and when we stop for lunch, a van will take one driver for each rig back to the morning spot, let them drive their rigs to the night camp spot, then return the drivers back to the lunch spot in order to finish the afternoon portion of the ride!  

They will have a chuck wagon for our food, but not the horses, so Cindy and John turned the forward-most stall of the 3 horse stock trailer into a hay/feed room!  The FCTA (Florida Cracker Trail Association) will also have a porta-potty wagon along with us as there are 125 riders, including kids, who will need to "go"!  The porta-potty will be a luxury!  

If you would like to see more about this organized ride, or even join the group next year, check out; 

http://www.crackertrail.org/annualride.html