Giddy-Up!

So a couple of weeks ago, Ryan told me he was going to take me on a date. A mystery date. Here's the information I was given ahead of time. It's an hour and twenty minutes from home. We have a buy-one-get-one-free coupon. The event takes an hour to complete. It's important that the weather is decent. A reservation is possible, but not required. And he couldn't promise me I wouldn't die or end up with helmet head.

I. Had. No. Idea.

So Saturday morning, after getting home from work at 1:30 a.m. the night before, we got up bright and early, I straightened my hair {taking no chances with the helmet hair} and we set out for date day!

We started with breakfast - trying out a restaurant we'd not been to before. {Well, I'd been there once, years ago, with Olivia, before Indiana had a smoke-free restaurant policy. It's considerably better now. You can actually taste the food, not just the smoke.}

 We found a little table near the front window and ordered up! We found it very interesting that the waitresses there wear scrub tops!

 Can you TELL I'd pretty much gotten zero sleep?

 After breakfast {which included drinking out of mugs that advertised for home health care, funeral homes, and sewer companies...giving away the standard demographic of the regular diners...} we hopped in the car and got ready to go! At this point, I still did not know where we were going.

 Then he told me to look under the visor:

 We drove and drove and drove and ended up here...in the middle of nowhere....

 Okay, let's pause for a moment, shall we? I'm pretty much terrified of horses. I mean, have you SEEN Little House on the Prairie? That episode where Nellie gets thrown into the water and has to fake her paralysis to get all the attention??

So we went into the little barn and with no time to prepare, I was ushered up a step stool and onto the back of Peaches. Peaches, who would hold my very life and hopefully-lack-of-paralysis in her hands for the next hour. No offering of a helmet for helmet hair, which both relieved and terrified me. I was issued a quick lesson on driving a horse. Pull the reins left and right to turn left and right just like a turn signal. Pull back to stop. Relax to let her walk. Obviously these people had not seen me in driver's ed when I was fifteen. I curbed the car. I fully anticipated completing the equestrian equivalent of that without much delay.

I was so nervous, that I don't even remember our guide's name. She was decked out in jeans and cowboy boots. I was in capris, and Ryan forgot the bug spray. {He never forgets ANYTHING.} {Mosquitoes LOVE me.} But I digress. We started out on this nice wide trail, and I was remembering our instructions to stay in a single file line.

Problem.

Peaches likes to head to the front of the line. I asked what to do, and the guide said, "You have to remember to drive her. Guide her back to the left." And there it is. Equestrian driver's ed FAILURE.

 We went by all the little corrals and stables and such, and while I clung to the reins and tried to ever-so-gingerly guide l'il Peaches in the straight and narrow {okay, wide}, Ryan snapped pictures with his phone. Seriously. Nothing scares him.

And then, the uh, straight and wide became curvy, narrow and QUITE TRAILY. Feel free to use that word. Traily. We were instructed in the art of leaning forward to ride uphill and leaning back to ride downhill.

 It was somewhere in here that I began to wonder what my l'il Peaches would do if she saw a snake. I mean, I knew what I would do if I saw a snake, and Peaches had JUST enough Bekah-esque attitude in her that I feared she would not handle such a thing well. And that whole Nellie Oleson thing came back into my head with a vengeance.

It was also somewhere in here that a lovely family of mosquitoes created the perfect scheme: let's attack her ankles. They're wide open in those capris and everyone knows she can't kick us off while she's riding a horse!!

In the end, we saw no snakes, and I managed to Lamaze my way through the mosquito bites. 

 I actually began to relax and have fun and dared to take my hands off of 9 and 3 long enough to whip around for this picture. {From my best side.}

 Yeah, this is my husband, Mr. Cool. Mr. I'm-Not-Even-Close-To-Nervous. Sorry there aren't more pictures of him. We found my photography handicap. Horseback riding.

 

 When we got back in the stable, Ryan probably gracefully exited his saddle in one smooth move. I resembled a hippo trying to pole vault in the two person effort required to extract me from Peaches.

That Ryan Shaffer. He pushes me right out of my comfort zone on a regular basis - and I love it. He proves to me I'm capable of things I never thought I could conquer. Thanks, Baby, for our mystery date! Thanks for loving me and showing me I'm brave when I only see a wimp.