Fall Visit

We finally have some visitors for a few days! Mom and Jill came out Friday night and we've been super-busy the past few days... Saturday morning we went to the Heard Museum downtown and were treated to a tour given by Native American (one Hopi and one Navajo) high school students as well as a Mexican art fair in the courtyard of the museum. The Heard Museum is one of those things in Phoenix that I've wanted to do since we moved here and I finally got to! It's a Native American history, culture and art museum that was well-worth the admission fee. After a healthy lunch at Zoe's and a stop at World Market, Mom and I head up to north Scottsdale for my 2nd AZSR race.

I was a little put out by the 4pm race start (who wants to run a race at 4pm?) and the location was really far from where we live downtown but the course was nice and flat. We were doing a 10k this time instead of a 5k and most of the kids ran well. I ran a 52:30 and ended up winning my age group; Mom got 2nd in hers. We came home to get Jill and Keeper (who was at a medical business conference all weekend) and went out for quality Mexican food. Yum. Yesterday morning we took Chloe for a nice long walk, went to church and then headed up to Cave Creek for our horseback ride at Spur Cross Stables. We had made a 3pm reservation for an hour and half trail ride. As we were loading up the horses we heard thunder rumbling and saw very dark clouds... but we started the ride anyway. I was glad that we had our own private guide just for the three of us instead of being included in the group of 10 people who were there at the same time. We rode off on the trail (that's me on Diamond, Mom on Dustin, and Jill on Hershey) and the clouds just kept getting darker. Our cowboy, Ian (or Slim), told us story after story and we noticed lightning and then we started to get wet. After a while, even Ian got spooked and we had to turn around and cut our ride short. He informed us that all the metal parts of a western saddle made us "human lightning rods" and that he'd actually seen a horse get struck by lightning before and it "wasn't too pretty". We followed him back to the ranch and the owners were kind enough to reschedule us for Monday morning. We drove back downtown with a stop at Dreamy Draw Park to watch the sunset.

We got up bright and early today and were at the ranch again for our 8:30am ride. It was a beautiful, cool, sunny morning and we had a different guide this time. I rode Hershey, Mom again got Dustin, and Jill rode Handsome. We had a fabulous ride and saw all sorts of wildlife (deer, jackrabbits, birds, etc). I absolutely loved being out in the "real" desert. It is so peaceful and quiet. I hadn't ridden a horse since middle school (probably) or even earlier but it was really fun and I will definitely go back to Spur Cross Stables again. The people (and horses) were fabulous. We followed up our ride with a hearty breakfast and a walk around Frontier Town in Cave Creek. We headed back down to Phoenix in time for the first day of soccer tryouts at my school.