Hey, Everyone!

Look!

Janell’s back!

“Here, let me turn around…

and this is my front…”

River City Roundup is wrapped up for another year. Rumor has it that it might be the last. About 85 riders and six wagons started out at Nottleman’s Flea Market; a campground on the Omaha Indian Reservation, north of Macy, NE. My friend Sharon and I rode some trails on Saturday afternoon.

And then… it rained all night Saturday night and most of Sunday morning.

When the sky finally cleared in the late afternoon, some small groups went out for another 2-3 hour ride on the Reservation. Most of the place looks like a Karl Bodmer painting – maybe more about that in some other post.

Monday, (after another night of rain) we followed our usual routine for moving camp: We saddle our horses, find a good tree or fencepost to tie them to and then get in line and caravan all the trailors to the next night’s camp. They haul the riders back to the horses and we spend the rest of the day riding to the next stop – in this case, we rode to Blackbird Creek Ranch between Decatur and Lyons. (Just a few miles east of Jefferson School and about a half mile from the old Blackbird Creek Church, for those of you who know where that is.) It continued to rain on us most of the morning and since we ride mostly on minimum maintenance roads, some of the wagons had a little trouble.

It didn’t rain Tuesday night – hallelujah! Wednesday morning, we trailored the horses and the camp to Tekamah, where we saddled up and rode out to Summit Lake. We had dinner and then rode back through some nice scenery. Our camp was at the Hoot Gibson Rodeo Grounds.

We spent the next morning riding horseback into Herman and then loaded up and moved to the Washington County Fairgrounds in Arlington. Personally, I used the afternoon for catching up on some sleep. We had a DJ and dancing after supper and all the obligatory “thank-yous” and some fun awards were handed out – one to the first rider to get bucked off, one for the one came from farthest away (this year that was Arizona), etc. and so on.

Friday, we loaded up and trailored into Two Rivers State Park, where we rode the trails for the morning. After dinner, we moved everything downtown to Freedom Park by the airport in Omaha.

Friday night, we have a “Trails End Party” for all the riders who participated. In addition to my ride; the Northeast Nebraska trail, we met with the Iowa riders and the West Riders. Most of the rest of them went to the Rodeo and Larry the Cable Guy concert. I did a little shopping in the vendor hall and browsed around in the exhibit hall where they were having the Ak-Sar-Ben Livestock Show. Then I headed back to Freedom Park and hit the sack.

Saturday morning, we all rode in the Parade and then headed home.

So that’s where I’ve been all week. I see that I missed some emails and such and will spend some time getting caught up with that.

Now, it’s back to work!

I’ll be blog-hopping tomorrow.

The post below is from my partner, Joe, who also happened to be gone all last week. I wonder how many times our “automated email responses” would have talked to each other if I had remembered to set that up….?