Moving Day

 These are the two horses we moved today. Cisco is on the left and Tess is on the right. Cisco is an old cow horse who is living out his retirement here in the pasture. Tess is a younger horse acquired a few years ago to ride. Both horses are effectively pasture ornaments.

The horses are well fed and have spacious areas in which to roam. They each have separate pastures. But horses are a lot like other pets. They need constant contact and handling to keep them tame and easily handled. These horses suffer from a lack of handling. Being left alone most of the time they are fairly wild and Tess is especially skittish. Three of us spent over half an hour trying to catch Cisco in his pasture this morning. We finally lured him with some feed and got a halter on him. Tess was easy to halter but absolutely refused to enter the trailer. We all worked for over two hours to get her into the trailer. Finally, what worked was to back the trailer into a slope and empty two tractor bucketsful of dirt onto the trailer floor so it looked like the ground went right into the trailer. Even then we had to box her in with gates on one side and the tractor on the other. It took lots of kind words and urging to get ther to finally move into the trailer. You just don't force a half ton of horse to do anything. And if she got too wild, we wouldn't even have been able to hang on to her. So we proceded to be as patient as we could muster and as creative as it took. It only took five minutes to unload them and they both looked visisbly relieved. Here is Tess in her new quarters in the shadow of the San Francisco peaks North of Flagstaff.

While we were trying to figure out how to get Tess loaded, this guy crawled out of the pasture.

It was four foot Bullsnake, a non-poisonous snake common to the area. In fact all the snakes I've seen out here have been Bullsnakes. I have yet to see a rattler. The cat wasn't too sure of what to do.

After we delivered the horses, we met a bunch of family in downtown Flagstaff for lunch. We went to a diner called the Galaxy. It's right on the old main route through town which also happens to be Route 66. They play up the old time connection to the hilt and have the walls covered with pictures of movie stars, most from quite a long time ago. The had great food and a huge menu and great service as well. Certainly a place not to miss when traveling through.

The horse delivery took up most of the day so that meant I didn't get any time in wiring on the bus. That's on the list for tomorrow. I saw the main sink being plumbed in today and the new wheel seal is done.