Oh. So THIS is how I'm going to die.

Last Sunday as I was getting ready for church, I got a phone call from Lauren. She told me to strap on my boots 'cause we were going up to the mountains to go horseback riding at her dad's house. Although normally I'd be all about it, I felt a little guilty about missing church. Of course, that guilt was quickly dispersed when Lauren assured me that God would want me to go to the mountains.
By the time we made it to Virginia, it was lunchtime and her dad was cooking up some sloppy elk. It looked exactly like a regular sloppy joe, but tasted about 235% better. Who knew? Elk is delicious! After lunch we went out to the pasture to pick out our horses. I was told that Minnie was the easiest one to ride, so I got her. Lauren got Glory, the blind-in-one-eye horse who also happens to still be nursing her baby.
It took about an hour to saddle the horses up and I hopped on. Unfortunately, I pulled myself up onto Minnie like used to do when I was 5 years old and would pull myself onto Gus (with every bit of arm strength that I could muster). I managed to tear a few muscle fibers from the bone in which they were intended to stay attached to with that move. Ugh. I'm an idiot. (I can assure you that the second time I got on, I did it like a normal person. You know...with leg strength and grace.)
After riding Minnie around the barn about 3 times (for some reason she was really loving that barn), Lauren was on her horse and ready to go. Her dad had been fighting some sort of illness all week and said he would just wait in his truck while we rode for awhile (the pasture where the horses are is definitely not within walking distance of the house, so her dad had driven us to the barn).
The first 3 minutes of our excursion was great! Minnie followed Glory out into the field with lovely wildflowers and then came the not so fun part...
Right when we got to the edge where "the field" became "the woods", Minnie decided that she had had enough and she wanted to get back to the barn...fast. She turned around and ran full steam ahead through the wrong gate and between two ponds. No matter how much I pulled back and screamed, "WHOA!!!!", she would continue on (and actually go faster). My first thought was, "Well, this must be how I'm going to die. I will be falling off this horse and falling onto a rock like Michelle did in the series finale of Full House. Dang." Eventually I realized that if I didn't want to fall off, I would just have to let go of the reigns and hang on tight until she got to where she wanted to go.
Right as Minnie was turning around, I had seen Glory rear up on Lauren. By the time we finally got back to where Minnie wanted to go, I yelled for Lauren's dad to help me. My favorite part was when he just stared at me when I screamed "HELP!", but when I said, "Oh! And Lauren is having trouble with Glory back there!", he went running. Oh, well...I can't blame him for playing faves.

So needless to say, we spent our Father's Day doing something that has bugged fathers around the world for years...
Begging to do something (in this case, riding horses) and then calling it quits 10 minutes later when the going gets tough.