Day 31: Hail & Rain & Cold, Oh My! - 31km

Jude & Clermont in Saint Leonard to Sonya & Michael's in Saint Basile

Once again, we were not sure where we were going to stay that night, but Cler offered to drive our packs so that already made the day better.

The beginning of the morning was going really well. It was sunny but not hot, our ipods were charged and the horses were energized.

The second half of the morning, things changed. The sky quickly shifted and it looked like two different days. Behind us it was bright and cheery, in-front of us however, it was dark and ominous. Oh no.. we thought. We were headed straight to the dark side.

There was no easing in to the rain, it just came all at once. Not just rain though, HAIL!

We picked up in to a fast trot. Ora was being weird. She kept putting her head really far down, I thought she was going to buck! Even worse though, she kept trying to turn left, right in to traffic! No matter how hard I tried to keep her head straight, she resisted. What the heck Ora?! Katie and Lux headed to a tree to take shelter. Since they were quite a ways ahead, Ora started even getting more stressed because she hates being far away from Lux.

I hopped off in hopes I could control her better. I was wrong. She started to go in circles then started cantering! At one point I was behind her bum practically being dragged, I almost let go but I managed to run fast enough to keep up and slow her down. I didn’t even realize how bad the hail was until we got under the tree and there was little ice balls on the saddle pads.

I then realized both the horses kept trying to turn around to protect there face! A ‘Ha! Stupid humans, making them run IN TO the bad weather!

The rest of the day was miserable. We were both soaked and got a chill very quickly. We knew there was no point in stopping anywhere so we just kept going. We eventually came upon a pavilion Cler and Jude were talking about. They thought we could set up camp there for the night.

We figured it could work but it was close to the highway and would have been stressful for the horses, so when Clermont came to drop off our stuff, I asked if there was a camp site near by and he thought there was. He took a quick drive to see how far and if we could stay there with the horses.

Yes! It was a go. It was only 1.8km away and the horses would even have a paddock.

There we met Sonya and Michael. They showed us to where the horses would sleep and to our campsite. It was so nice to have time away from the horses. We love them to death but being able to just relax and not worrying about them or deal with their silly ways, was much needed.

We had a good camp fire dinner, worked on some blogs and were off to bed.