Of Horses and Farewells

With our time in Alaska quickly drawing to a close, I went on the last adventure of my time there: horseback riding with Aponi out in Palmer, Alaska.

Aponi was really hyper and excited. It might have something to do with the coffee she had just ingested...

After an hour of driving, we made it. Hurray!

Aponi's horse, Princess. 

This is the best you're gonna get of my steed. Her name was Patience, and she had more spirit than the name might imply. I was glad of that. I like interesting horses.

The scenery was breathtaking, as I've come to expect here. 

We shared a shallow lake/river/glacier runoff area with tourists on ATVs part of the time. They made the water and sand look pretty fun. A bit messier riding what they were on than what we were on (and a good bit less peaceful), but still fun.

This is our guide, Hosanna. Yep, I asked her about her name before we even started. She was a Christian and soon found out I was, too. That made our four and a half hour horseback ride full of pretty rich conversation. God sometimes works things out that are so bizarre there is no explanation for them but Him. There's a tremendous amount of the story I'm choosing to skip over here for reasons of my own, but suffice it to say that Hosanna and her family are well out of the ordinary, and the world seemed mind-bogglingly small and large and strange and wonderful all at once by the end of the ride. If you want to know more than that, you can ask me about it in person.

[We hit it off so well with Hosanna that she invited us to come to her house the next day. Mom and I went.]

Four and a half hours is an awfully long time to ride a horse when you haven't done it in a while. Aponi was beginning to wilt rather noticeably by the time we stopped for lunch.

"Back on the horse?!" 

She had been so excited she was giddy just a few hours before, mind you.

And that was the horseback riding adventure (extremely abbreviated version). 

Mom and I said goodbye to Aponi, packed our bags, and flew away home.

I'm afraid that marks the end of this particular escapade in a faraway place. Now it's back to the normal stuff. But when you return to the familiar after immersion in the strange, the familiar gains a newness that makes it fresh. To an Alaskan, the hills and forests of our very own bit of earth right here would be just as charmed. I write this as a temporary Alaskan who is now back in New York and, truth be told, rather glad to be home after all.

Home is home, and that's what it comes down to. 

In the end, I'm a person of roots.