The next morning we show back up at the farm, stash our luggage in the storage room, and walk over to the stable with our saddlebags. People are out and about doing things, but we're not quite sure where to start until we see Tilman. Surprisingly, he asks us if we're doing the trail--why, of course we are, that's why we have saddlebags and the map he provided. He says, "Oh, yes, and did I assign you horses?" Well, you can see that this might be a little off-putting.

He points us to the racks of saddles, bridles and halters identified by number, and the horse list which tells you which horse is which number. Jill's horse is missing his saddle in the rack spot. We both grab halters and walk out to the paddock. Walking through the muck to the feed trough where my black horse (with a white diamond on the face and three white feet, although I couldn't tell this at the time as we were in about a foot of black mud) was feeding, I was able to easily "catch him" (i.e., put the halter on and lead him out). I put him in a stall and make my first mistake. Tilman tells me to remove his rope, but I go to remove the entire halter, not just the rope attached to it. We put a bucket of oats in there for him.

Jill's horse turned out not to be in the paddock, so by this time she has gone off with one of Tilman's sons to find her horse out in the field. That leaves me alone with Sunny. Now, back in D.C., I know what to do next. You get out your tack box and groom the horse (brush them to check for any cuts or lingering mud/burrs that might interfere with the saddle, then take a hoof pick to their feet to make sure there aren't any rocks stuck in the groves). But in a strange barn and stable, I'm just looking around trying to figure out where I'm supposed to tie the horse up to for this task, or if I'm supposed to do it right there in the stall, plus I'm not sure where the brush/pick are. I basically decided to wait until Jill returned, figuring that it wouldn't help for me to be too far ahead of her in this process in any case.

Jill came back from the pasture with her horse in tow and put it in the stall next to me. Together we determined that the best thing to do would be to tie the horses up to a small ring in the back wall of the stalls and groom them right there. I obtained some grooming tools from buckets in a back hall (discovered later that each horse had its personal kit, in that same area with the saddles, etc. by number). Managed to clean up the horse without a problem, including getting it to pick up it's feet for a thorough hoof cleaning.

Went back to get the blanket and felt to put the saddle on and managed to do everything fine...until I went to put the girth (the strap that goes under the belly to hold the saddle in place) on. Typically, horses will take a deep breath before you strap up the girth, because they are afraid you will squeeze them too much. But I couldn't even get the girth on in the "last" holes. It was like trying to put on your belt, and you had run out of leather. I checked to make sure I had the right saddle and girth, then finally called one of the sons over to help me. He laughed and said that Sunny must have put on some weight in the paddock and told me he'd go get me a longer girth for him. As he was about to walk away, he said that he would get me some stirrups, too.

I tried not to show it, but I was berating myself for not even seeing that my saddle was missing stirrups (where you put your feet to help you stay balanced in the saddle). The son came back and we got the girth on, then he put the first stirrup on, showing me what he was doing, then invited me to do the same on the other side. I tried, but when he came over, he said, "you might want to put the stirrup on the leathers first" (i.e., I had been trying to put the leather on the saddle, forgetting to put the metal on first, which would be needed). My flustering grew.

By now Jill had not only caught up to me, but was past me. She had obtained her saddle from somewhere and was already finishing up getting her saddlebags on. She had had to ask for help, but was able to take the instruction much quicker. The son, who had probably figured out that I was clueless by now, stuck around and showed me how to attach the saddlebags, which we completed without too much of a problem.

Jill and I led our horses out to the paddock where we both saddled up without a problem, walking the horses around for just a few seconds before being let out a gate in the front and beginning the trail. By our calculations, we were about 30 minutes to an hour behind schedule, which wouldn't be too much of a problem, as we had about a 4-hour window when the tide would be out far enough to ride along the beach. It felt good to be out away from the barn, where the number of people (who knew so much more than I about everything involved) was so high.

As we rode along, we started to get a feel for what the next six days would be like. The trail, marked for us in yellow highlighter on the map, was also marked with spray-painted yellow arrows on the ground or light-poles along the way, but these arrows were few and far between. We had a brief moment of confusion deciding whether the road/path we had selected to take us from the road to the beach was the correct one, but determined that we were on the right route by the number of hoofprints in the soft ground. Eventually we got down to the "beach."

At this point in the trail, the beach was actually just seawood strewn over fairly large rocks. Not gravel, but not boulders. The horses, amazingly sure-footed (but then, maybe you would be too, if you had feet the size of dinner-saucers and legs like small tree-trunks), worked their way over the rocks slowly but deliberately.

We paralleled the coast, moving to the road at one spot when the horses refused to cross some moving water (we discovered later that we simply needed to establish their trust in us--they couldn't determine the depth of the water, and they didn't know their riders well enough yet to trust our determination of the depth). But after about two hours we were able to move out onto the wet mud of the flats, trotting slightly. There we met another horse from the farm, being ridden by one of the people whom we had eaten dinner with the night before. My horse got a little excited when he rode off, because Sunny wanted to go running off that way as well, but I did a good job of keeping him in-line. Then we rode across the small peninsula to the other side where there was a sandy beach.

The race track. As soon as the horses felt the sand of this beach under their feet, they were off. And I don't mean just a run, but a full-tilt gallop as if they had just heard the gun and they were running the Derby. Jill screamed out to me to grab the mane and just hang on, but I felt strange about pulling on the horse's hair. Instead, I gripped the blanket and felt directly in front of me where it made a little loop in the crux of the saddle.

After about five minutes, where we traveled over the same amount of distance that had just taken us two hours, the horses were content to come to a walk. They had gotten their run out of them, and now were content to just trot or walk along the beach. Jill congratulated me on not coming off, and really I never felt in danger of that. Part of it was due to the "depth" of the saddle, plus with the saddlebags in front and in back, there really wasn't much place for your legs to go but stay right in the middle with the stirrups.

Because we had gotten such a late start we weren't able to ride across to an island (didn't want to get trapped on the island when the tide came in), so we turned around and rode back along the beach, including another fast gallop, although one much more controlled. We picked up the trail on the map and came to a cattle guard and a gate with a lock on it. This is when we realized that we had left the stable without ever receiving the key for the lock (we knew about it, because Tilman had pointed out the gates on the map when he went through it with the highlighter, but he had never presented us with a key). Luckily, there were some houses just a short walk away, so Jill held the horses while I trekked up to borrow the phone to call the Farm. The first house looked empty, but the second one had a lot of garden implements in the front yard. I couldn't understand the man who answered the door at all--I'm not sure if it was his accent, his mumbling, or a speech problem--but he understood me, and invited me in to use his phone. I talked with Collette, Tilman's wife, and she said that someone would be there in about 20 minutes with the key.

Twenty or so minutes later, Tilman drove up in the big truck (kind of a small semi) that the farm uses to haul the horses around in. He handed us the key and had also brought a grooming kit, but that was something we had remembered. He pointed out our first B&B, just across the way, then turned his big truck around while we opened the gate and walked the horses through.

Thirty minutes later we arrived at our first stop, a small house on the coast owned by a fisherman named Michaal. We tied the horses to metal rings set in the stone wall of his backyard, reversing the process of the morning--removing saddlebags, than saddle, blanket, and then grooming the horses.

Day 1 was over. I had survived intact, with no falls and no real fears. Easy trip, right?