Return to story

GENERATIONS saddling up for some bonding Age 10 is ticket to ride with Grandma

October 6, 2007 12:35 am

BY LUCIA ANDERSON

FOR THE FREE LANCE-STAR

CRANDALL, Ga.--They call the program "Just Horsin' Around."

It's billed as a week of riding horses and learning to care for them, with a horse auction and other extras thrown in. To a 10-year-old girl, it sounded like just the ticket for her special trip with Grandma.

Two years ago I took my grandson, Jack, on an Elderhostel intergenerational trip to Yellowstone National Park, promising his little sisters that they would each have a special trip when they got to be 10. This year it was Moira's turn.

I had sent her a list of possible trips that fit my budget and, I hoped, her interests. I'm told the choice took no time at all. Horse camp was the runaway winner. And it lived up to our expectations.

The program is located at Cohutta Springs, a conference and retreat center in northwestern Georgia run by the Seventh-day Adventists. Moira and I flew from Providence, R.I., her hometown, to Atlanta, where we rented a car. We could also have flown to Chattanooga, Tenn., but I thought there might be more to see in Atlanta.

Before we left the city we visited the Georgia Aquarium, a really neat place with some stunning exhibits. It's divided into different habitats--penguins and beluga whales in one area, river otters and piranhas in another. The highlight is a glass tunnel through a tank, where the fish swim over top and alongside the people. Cool!

We still had plenty of time to get to Cohutta Springs, an easy two-hour drive up Interstate 75 and U.S. 411.

There were 48 of us in the group, fairly evenly divided between grandparents and grandchildren, with a couple of parents included as well. The children ranged from 9 to 15. Some had never been on a horse before, others owned a horse or had taken lessons. Most of the adults had ridden some, but for almost all of us it was a long time ago.

We met our horses the morning after our arrival. There were only 24 horses, so we had to share. This was actually a good thing, because grooming and tacking up goes a lot faster with two people sharing the chores.

It did mean that we had to alternate time on horseback with other activities, but that was fun, too.

We soon learned our horses' quirks and crotchets. For instance, my horse, Desert, a buckskin quarterhorse, objected violently to having another horse behind her. That meant that I was always tail-end Charlie, except for the staff person riding sweep. Fortunately the horses were all fairly even-tempered, although they did

not

Horsin' Around is run by Fred Bruce, director of recreation and equestrian activities at Cohutta Springs. He and his wife, Pam, grew up in cow country in Colorado, so they know horses. He has tailored his program so even the rawest greenhorn can get into the saddle and ride out on the trail the very first day.

We were shown how to groom a horse, then we went and did it. Ditto for saddling and bridling, and then the all-important segment called "stop, start and steer."

Each group got a trail ride each day, starting with a short one-hour excursion the first day and gradually getting longer as our muscles and seat bones stopped complaining so bitterly. By the end of the week we were proud to find we could stay in the saddle for three hours and still walk after dismounting.

When the horses were out on the trail with the other group, we got to do a variety of activities, not all horse-related. There was the creek walk, where we got to splash along in ankle-deep water, searching for crawdads and whirligigs and other such aquatic creatures. We also found a couple of baby copperheads. Much squealing from the younger girls.

Then there was the morning we spent panning for gold. Dahlonega, just upstream from Cohutta Springs, is home to several gold mines that sell the leavings from their crushers for folks to have fun with.

Moira retrieved quite a number of gold flakes from her batch of sand. I found what they say is a good-size nugget (about as big as the head of the pin) and some colored stones I was told were rubies and emeralds. I'm willing to believe that.

Moira says her favorite activity was the Blob. It's a giant inflated vinyl cushion, floating on a lake, that you jump onto from about 12 feet up. Once you land, you scramble to the far end and when the next person jumps, you're bounced into the water. The kids could have kept on all night.

We also got to visit a real live horse auction just up over the state line in Tennessee. These were definitely not your upscale horse-show folks--more the bib-overall crowd.

It was a lot of fun to listen to the auctioneer rattle off his chant, and watch the vendors charge their mounts up and down, showing off for potential buyers. I could discern no particular reason why some horses sold and some weren't even bid on. They all looked pretty to me.

The highlight of the trip was to be a trail ride out to a campsite in the woods, where we would eat dinner cooked over a campfire, sleep in tents, eat breakfast and return to the resort. It started well, but we were hardly a mile down the road before it started thundering--back to the barn. Horses do not react well to lightning.

The storm seemed to have passed and the dining hall had not been expecting to feed us that evening, so it was decided that we would take a hayride out to the campsite and eat our planned dinner there.

We weren't even out of sight of the resort before it started raining again. Torrents. By the time we got to our dinner we were sopping wet. But we were a hardy crew, and managed to get our teeth to stop chattering long enough to chow down on hobo stew and corn pone.

Then we came back, changed into dry clothes and had our campfire by the pool. The s'mores tasted just as good as if we had been in the woods. And a bunch of us grandmas totally embarrassed our descendants by warbling all the old songs like "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain" and "What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor?"

The kids tried to drown us out with some pop songs, but they didn't all know the words and their attempt failed. Rock on, grandmas!

I was sorry not to have the night out in the woods, because it's really beautiful in that corner of Georgia. Most of our riding took place in Cherokee National Forest, which is adjacent to Cohutta Springs. There are mountains, at least what we call mountains here in the East, and the trails wind up and down through lovely old-growth forest.

We ended the week with our own rodeo where the bravest among us competed in the bubble-gum race, the cup-of-water race and the egg-in-the-spoon race.

The next day, Moira and I drove back to Atlanta and had time to take in the Atlanta Zoo before flying back to Providence.