Just Ridin'

After a hard weekend of racing, sometimes you just need to go out and toodle around a bit. So I headed out to the rich side of the road to talk to the horses. You can learn a lot from horses if you pay attention.

1. All the horses have fly sheets and hats these days. Getting eaten up by bugs is not nice, and if you are going to go out in public, a hat can be a good thing.

2. All the horses in my neck of the woods have grazing muzzles on right now. Due to the vagaries of nature, you may have gotten plenty of rain, but in Goochland we are Sahara dry. Horses need to think they are eating all the time, but if they actually could eat all the time during the drought, they'd destroy the pasture. (and end up eating a lot of dirt.)

3. When the sun is out, horses get in the shade. Horses may be walking vet bills, but even they aren't dumb enough to stand in the sun and bake if they can help it.

4. Horses understand team work. One guy usually is on the lookout for bad things, while everyone else snacks or sleeps. If everyone was on the look out all the time, no one would get to eat or sleep. Team work keeps you safe.

A little farther down all the corn fields are getting cut already. Yeah, it's August, but since we didn't get rain when we needed the rain the corn out here is a close total loss. So the farmers are chopping it up and making silage to feed the cows. For the first time in years some of these guys were going to make a profit due to the flooding in the mid-west. Unfortunately we couldn't buy any of that rain and crops here have dried up to nothing.

Toodling on the bike is always an eye opening experience. Just going a little slower and you never know what you'll see. Like the deer in the soy beans, the foxes following the combines to get the mice and rats that get scared up... lots of stuff.

Life is good, but it sure would be better if it rained!