A Tale of Two Horses

Hunter and I have spent the last couple of weeks getting our boat ready for deer season as well as helping friends get their rigs ready.  We’ve repainted a boat, upholstered seats and put a lift kit on a golf cart with off road tires.  I also have a friend who buys a Jeep every year and every year he needs me to attach his wench to the front of it.  This year I took the opportunity to add my unique design.  Now that I have a logo (thanks ScottysWeb!) I used a plasma torch to free handedly burn my logo into the bar.  Then I fabricated a couple of horseshoes and welded them to each side of the wench to frame it.  He really liked it.  I get a kick out of surprising people with more than they expected. 

 

 

 

What do you think?
 
I actually enjoy helping people and I love horses.  Many years ago my friend in Colorado was experiencing a draught and his horses were starving.  He called me for help and said he would give me a couple of ‘em if I would come get ‘em.  I’ve always liked riding horses and wanted my daughter, Samantha, and my son, Hunter, to have the experience of owning and caring for a horse.  So I said yes, hooked up the trailer and took off for Colorado with Hunter. 

Do you ever look back at moments in your life and say, “If only….”?  Mine would be, “If only I had asked him the names of those horses.”  But I didn’t and so began an exhausting journey.  We drove non-stop to Colorado on a crusade to save the horses.  We arrived 16 hours later, tired but excited to see the horses.  What my friend brought out was not exactly what we had envisioned.  The first one was a really old mare that had the worst sway back I had ever seen.  To this day, I haven’t seen one worse. And what was her name you ask?  Granny.  My first thought when I saw her was, “It’s going to cost me $300 to rent a back hoe to bury her.” The other horse, however, was a thoroughbred.  Yay me, right?  Wrong!  That horse only knew one speed.  Faster! 

Well, I couldn’t let ‘em starve so we loaded ‘em up and headed back home.  It took 16 hours to get there but it took 24 hours to get home because we had to stop every so often to let ‘em walk around.  At one stop, we tied ‘em up and went in to get a bite to eat.   When we came out the “Faster!” horse was gone.  We ended up driving around that town ‘til we finally found him.  That trip turned out to be the longest trip I have every taken in my life.

In the end, I wound up with two horses I couldn’t ride and couldn’t keep.  Hunter was a little boy at the time and when I put him on the “Faster!” horse, he took off.  All I could see was my little boy holding on for dear life with that horse getting further and further away.  I finally caught up with him but I couldn’t let the kids ride him after that.  The kids loved Granny.  She was a sweet and docile horse, but we didn’t have the heart to ride her because of her back.  Eventually I was able to find good homes for them.

So the moral of the story is, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth without asking for its name first.