We had intended to visit Ireland last year. About three or so years ago, when we were living in Washington State, our friend Pamela Florence first got Jill interested in going on a foreign trip where you could take a couple of horses out for a week of trail riding. Since then, they had talked about doing a trip like this off and on, acquiring information about the companies that organize such trips, etc. Just as we began setting up such a trip for 2001, the hoof-and-mouth problem hit, and we realized that there was a good chance that no one would be able to ride horses around either England or Ireland for a good number of months. The trip was rescheduled for 2002.

We hadn't intended to go alone. Pam Florence had been meant to join us, but she had a series of medical emergencies (both herself and her mother), then bought a new home. Our friend Kathleen here in D.C. had expressed interest in accompanying us, but then she obtained a new boyfriend in Arizona, and he wasn't a horseback rider.

For that matter, I'm not much of a horseback rider either. Although I had wanted to ride when I was a kid, I never got the chance and the bug seemed to have passed. Not for Jill. She has loved horses since she can remember--she used to break the legs off her Barbies by trying to get them to sit on her Breyer horses. While in undergraduate college, she traded work at a stable for the ability to ride and take lessons. In Colorado, she leased a horse. Finally, about nine years ago, she realized her dream of buying her own horse, a Morgan mare called Rogue Triton Mist.

Last August, Jill asked me if I was serious about the trip, which she wanted to do very badly. The last trip that she was so emphatic about had been going to the Galapagos, and that one had been so amazing that who was I to disdain something like this. It's not that I was inexperienced with horses--I had done my share of trail-riding on vacations both in Colorado and in Canada, but these rides had been at the most an hour or two. In Ireland, we were talking about six days of riding, from 4 to 6 hours per day. By agreeing to the vacation, I also agreed to do some training. I promised to start at Christmas. That's when my sister-in-law would give me a horseriding lesson to start me off, then I promised to ride Rogue twice a month initially, then weekly up until the time we left.

The training went fairly well, too. The lesson from Kim established my ability to "post" a trot, which I refined in my bi-monthly rides in January. And I learned from Jill how to tack, groom, and untack.

But Jill was worried that I needed a little more. Specifically, that I needed to be able to stay on during a canter, at least, just in case the horse took off while I was on it. To this end, we took Rogue to a back pasture, because she's a little pokey in the ring, and I did fine cantering for about 10 minutes, until I lost a stirrup and came off. And when I landed, I landed hard. For awhile, I was sure that I had broken a rib. My side was sore for a good two weeks afterward. Jill was aghast, of course, upset by not only her self-guilt for putting me out on Rogue when I wasn't ready (her perception), but also fear that I wouldn't be ready for Ireland after we had already purchased tickets and put down the downpayment for the trip.

I agreed to take another lesson, this time from an instructor at the stable, and I was able to canter successfully during that lesson, but a week later, I took Rogue out on a trail ride with some others at the stable, and fell off when Rogue decided to jump a small stream. At least this fall wasn't so painful--in fact, it was more of a slip off than a fall, still that was enough to keep Jill's apprehensions high.

The trip was still on, and we left the U.S. for it on May 18th.