Strider

While at the lake I took Zoe on a hike through the woods and when we finally made it back to the actual trail we, at first, found Annie at the big log / swimming hole. We sat there for a long time with our toes in the water. Annie used to swim there while her grandma watched from the log.




When we decided to head back to where the family was gathering we found this gorgeous, red horse tied to a tree on the trail. A very woodsy, old man was sitting in the trees, looking at a map and eating his sandwich.  The horse's name was Strider and he was very gentle and good with kids. Another man was admiring the horse and it turned out that he also had a little grand-daughter named Zoe and he was there for Pete's grandpa's memorial. He told me that Strider is a Tennessee Walker and was very impressed by how well-behaved he was. This man used to be a horse [rancher?] man himself and got a little choked up talking about it and he just kind of walked away from us. Horses will do that to people, I guess.

Zoe LOVES horses. Almost as much as she loves unicorns. She begged me to ride Strider but it wasn't really that kind of encounter and the woodsy man sitting amongst the trees didn't offer so we moved on with promises to someday go to a ranch and learn to ride a horse.

If you look through the pictures in the Odell slideshow you'll see that Zoe is wearing [one of] her horse shirts the next day.

The pretty pink dress that she has on here was sent from Grandpa - thanks! Zoe says "I wish I could wear that beautiful, sparkly, pink dress!" whenever she wants to put it on. We now have some sparkly shoes to go with it.