Day One (posted on Day Two!)

I'll try to speed you up on the past few days. Kari has been better about blogging so far about the journey down: We've decided that it is easiest to compose at night, and then paste our entries into the blogs when we have access to internet.

Here is the first real entry since our arrival! We had a good journey down from Wisconsin. It was more arduous than I imagined it might be, but we had a relatively uneventful trip overall. We made it down to Murfreesborough the first night. We stayed at a really awful Ho-Jo. You definitely get what you pay for… The horses stayed in relative comfort at a farm out in the country. They had HUGE stalls (12x24 ft). We took a little time in the morning to get them outside before we loaded up. Loading took relatively little time compared to the first morning (Buzz didn’t want to load the first morning, so our best laid plans to leave by 5 am turned into 7:30 instead…) The trip through the mountains was pretty smooth, though we hit some very scary fog on the way down through the mountain pass. I’ll post some pictures of our road trip in a separate post.
We reached Florida late Saturday night. We slid through the Florida Ag Station without event. They scanned our paperwork and driver’s licenses, but did not actually come out and look at the horses. We could have had pigs in our trailer for all they knew! We had a little trouble finding our place of residence in the dark. The GPS brought us right to it, but the mailbox numbers were a little confusing. We ended up going down a long driveway that served multiple residences, none of which were ours. By the time we realized our mistake, we were ¼ mile down the driveway with few places to turn two massive trucks and trailers around. We eventually managed, and got turned around to find our actual rental house.
Our house is AWESOME. It is a three bedroom, two bath home on about 10 acres. The horses were able to stay with us overnight on Saturday, which was nice. Sunday morning we got loaded up and headed over to the Parelli Center by about 10:30. It was pretty cool to pull into the driveway and see Remmer and Allure in the front pasture. They are horse celebrities to us! Then around the next bend, we saw Casper and Zeus (the Friesian). Too cool!
We got checked in and got our horses settled in their pens. Josie and Vegas were not in adjacent pens. “Gasp!”—their reaction, not ours: ) They pretty much thought that they were going to die, and spent the rest of the day trying to convince us to kill them. They just about succeeded : )—more on that later!
BTW, I will post pictures later!
We had orientation at one o’clock. John and Cathy Barr (two of the instructors) told us about course logistics, etc. We then had a demo on “Me and My Shadow”. The whole idea is to be your horse’s shadow and mosey around with them wherever they want to go. It is a powerful exercise because you allow your horse to have some leadership. By mirroring them you become more aware of their thresholds, reactions to things, etc. Once the demo was done, we were free to go play with our horses and become their shadows. It was about 3 o’clock at that point, and we hadn’t eaten since breakfast time, so we ran into town to grab something to eat, and then went back to the center to shadow our horses. By this time, there was a fine mist coming down, so we trundled off to our pens to gather our horses. Let me tell you, Josie didn’t even want to acknowledge my presence. MY horse, that always comes to the gate with pricked ears, didn’t want to even flick me an ear. She was standing in the corner going “la la la la la la la” looking at everything BUT me. How interesting. She did eventually come check me out and we haltered up. Per the instructions, I had left the gate to her pen open, and we didn’t leave until she wanted to. It pretty much went downhill from there. I'll have to post more later. Sorry to leave you hanging, but I've got to go clean my horse's pen!