We left for Houston before 9 this morning to pick up the HayHut. Loong drive. Took us until after 3 to get there and we didn't get home again until 10 tonight. Whew! That thing is significantly larger and more unwieldy than we expected -- it stuck out an extra foot or more on each side and came up well above the top of the cab! Fortunately we had picked up four of those ratchet tie down things so Mark managed to fasten it down well enough, but it sure seemed to make the other people on the interstate nervous! They would race past us while the passengers would turn in their seats and stare! Apparently the thing was moving around in the wind enough to make them think it just MIGHT fly off and end up on THEIR vehicle!
It was pretty windy, too, and Mark had to drive comparatively slowly, but we finally made it home, and Mark and Jerry are going to bolt it together in the pasture over at Al's tomorrow. We'll talk to Torri and Daniel about picking up another round bale to put in it next time we see them, but in the meantime we'll probably just put a few of our regular square bales in there to see how the horses handle it.
We took Boo along to Houston and he was a GREAT traveler. Thought about putting the back seat down for him to sit on, but I decided it would be safer to put him on the floor. As it turned out, he's so tall that he could sit on the floor in the back and look out the side windows with no problem at all! I think if he had been sitting up on the seat back there his head might have touched the ceiling!
The place where we picked up the HayHut is Cypress Trails Equestrian Center north of Houston in Humble, Texas. They have FIFTY horses (Arabian, Paint, Spanish Mustang and Appaloosas) that they use for lessons and rent for trail rides on about 130 miles of trails. I've seen a lot of rental horses who looked like they needed rescued, but these horses all looked really good. And they had at least half a dozen of those HayHuts spread around their pastures for them. (They don't look nearly as big out there as they do on the truck, do they??)
There were probably around 15 horses all tacked up and tied up to various trees with hay nets there for each one, patiently waiting for riders.
There were two miniature horses there, as well, but the minis were loose and wandering around anywhere they wanted to go! She said they go in and out of all the pastures UNDER the fences and eat hay out of all the HayHuts (although there WAS one in one of the pastures about half the size of the rest, apparently meant for them). She said when they got down on the ground and pulled themselves under the fences at first, they were pretty worried about it, but then they decided it was really no problem since they never actually went anywhere except to the other pastures.
People going there can choose trail rides of various lengths beginning at one hour. This group was about to leave on one of the short, one-hour rides. I've never seen SO many really really REALLY calm horses in one place in my life! All very very sweet.
Wish I'd taken some pictures of the house, but I didn't. Darn! When you drive in, it looks kind of like one of those three-story houses you see along the water with the wide staircase going up to an entry off a wrap-around porch on the second floor. Those houses are built like that in case of flooding. But in this case, although you can't tell it from the front, that bottom floor is actually stables! Interesting. Well, it's midnight. Better get to bed. LOTS to do tomorrow.
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