In which I take a very short road trip, and return bringing: THE SPRING!

I had some vacation time set aside so I could attend the first endurance ride of the year, which unfortunately got cancelled due to a loss of permitting :-(

I could've stayed home to pout, and generally driven everyone around me entirely crazy; instead, I decided to use some of that time to visit my friend Sky!

Luna went with me--her first road trip without Mimsy and the rest of the family (including horses). Most of the time, she just slept in the front seat of the truck. She did enjoy the stops at Burgerville, and is very helpful when it comes to eating all those little overcooked bits of the rosemary-garlic french fries. No hamburger for you, Luna. But you can have pieces of the bun.


Here was my first surprise about Oregon: it's actually SPRING there! Not like at home, where the daffodils are blooming but it snowed 2 inches in Darrington the day I left. Sky's place is about 350 miles south of Haiku Farm, and the change in lattitude makes for a huge difference in climate this time of year.


The little pink flowers on this bush are salmonberry blossoms! Hooray!
Sky's horses celebrate Spring Shedding Season the same way Fiddle and Hana do: mud baths!


Fiddle's cousin Cricket is much prettier when she's clean.


Cricket's daughter Trinket is growing up to be a very Big Girl Horsey now. Hard to believe she's almost-but-not-quite 4 years old. She still does baby-horse stuff on the trail sometimes, but she's very tidy with her feet and very willing to try new stuff.


Cricket complains about tender soles the same way Fiddle does: she slows way down whenever there's any rock at all on the trail, but when the terrain is soft and nice, she takes off like a very carefully-aimed jet. Her trot is smoother than Fee's...on the other hand, her legs are much shorter, so she takes a lot more steps. I have to remind myself that the ground is a lot closer when I get off these nice short horses, so I don't jam my knees when I land on the ground so soon...it's a big change from getting up and down from Fiddle a.k.a. Gigantor!

I didn't have a "reason" for my road trip as much as I had an "exuse": Sky and Joe are doing a major remodel of their house this year, and she set aside all the lumber from the foundation forms: this will be excellent recycled building material for us to use in building a barn!!!


Sky is the Tetris Master! She crammed an uncanny amount of lumber into the back of the truck, and then tied it down with an ingenius series of knots. The load certainly squatted the truck down a little, but it didn't wiggle AT ALL...which is a relief, considering my commute home takes me through Tacoma and Seattle, where the "city-drivers" are notoriously dumb about allowing sufficient distance between a heavy rig and their silly little rollerskate cars.


Tomorrow we will unload all this stuff, and I will take more pictures.

I think it's sort of like toothpaste: we fit all that stuff into a relatively compact container. Once we take it out of the truck, it will expand back into a fabulous, fully-inflated, gigantic stack of lumber.

Here's the big surprise: although it was winter when I left home, I seemed to have dragged at least SOME "Springtime" back with me: look what I saw at a rest area in Washington on the drive home!