Ticks, Ticks, Ticks......

Cierra and I trailered over to our friend Tracy's house to ride with her and another friend, Nancy Peavy. It was a two mule, two horse day. Tracy was riding Prize and Nancy was riding her mule, Ellie Mae. We were a few minutes late arriving so Tracy and Nancy were ready to ride when we pulled in. Cierra and I quickly tacked up and we were off. It was around 1:30 pm when we headed out. Prize was a little excited when we first arrived as he and my Marie have a "history". And he remained quite fascinated with her the entire ride but he behaved himself. Though at the start of the ride, while going along a flat spot in a field, he did trip over nothing at all as far as we could see and Tracy took a tumble from the saddle. She was fine other than pulling her shoulder a bit from trying to hang onto him. Prize did trot off but not far. All the green grass in the field was too delicious for him to leave. We kept the pace quite slow overall. Cierra had not put on Tinkerbell's boots as the ride, overall, was not rocky. But, Tinkerbell was a bit more sensitive than we'd expected and it was a fairly warm day. We rode over to the Lorax trails in Pittston. We haven't had much rain and everything is so dry right now. After making a couple of loops around the Lorax trails and taking a few dead ends, we rode back to Tracy's, we rode about 15 miles and were in the saddle about 5 hrs due to the slower pace we kept. I dropped Cierra off at her house on my way back to the barn. Had I known how many ticks were on the horses, I'd have taken her back to the barn with me to help me pick them all off. I picked nearly 30 off Tinkerbell and 10 or so off Marie. And when we found more on the both the next day. The Lorax trails are really nice to ride on but I'm not feeling inclined to ride there for a while. It's always been a high tick area but I've never picked up that many in one ride before. YUCK!