Wifey’s Horseback Ride

The phone conversation from one of the last days of my wife’s week away from home on “girly” vacation started something like this:

“We’re 20 minutes late for our horseback ride.”

Wait. Horseback ride? You screamed like you were being attached to the human centipede when we rode the camel together.

“THAT WAS A CAMEL. THIS IS A HORSE WITH A SADDLE AND A CUTE NAME. DON’T HATE THE PLAYER!”

I’m not. I just don’t see this ending well.

“CUTE NAME! SADDLE! You don’t know! I will OWN that ride! You’ll see!”

She hung up.

So, two days later, she returns home. I’m thinking three things:

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• She has no injuries because she backed out of the horseback ride at the last second, listening to the committees in her beautiful head that pass laws on her dexterity and agility.
• She’s completed the ride and did so well, she believes that she is, in fact, Elizabeth Taylor’s character in “Black Beauty.” Oh, and we would own a horse. We would have no where to put a horse.
• Her friend would wheel her in the front door on a dolly wrapped in gauze, with splints made from whatever could be found on the floorboards of the car.

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Instead, the accounting of her story goes something like this:

Apparently, Wifey expected the ride to be more like Georgia State fair pony rides, wherein she would be helped up to a steed and pulled along at a nice leisurely pace, probably through a vineyard as someone named Paolo served her wine poured from the deep pectoral crevice in his muscle-bound chest, complimenting her on all the while on her new leather purchases and purse finds.

Instead, she and her friend missed the part in the disclaimer that said, “Hey, remember those parts in all the Spaghetti western films Clint Eastwood made here where his horse is being shot at, chased down steep hills, pushed up even steeper climbs and driven relentlessly along trails made of crumbling rock and tears, propped up along the sides of sheer rock faces ground from hate? Well, except for the shooting, welcome to your horse ride!”

Her ride, it seems, read something more like the recap of the journey of the Donner Party mushing over the Rockies than it did some gentile equestrian aside. Each of the 2,313 times Wifey freaked out, the horse farted. It wasn’t so bad for Wifey, who never noticed the horse’s flatulence, but Wifey’s trailing girlfriend wasn’t as thrilled.

Hills like rollercoaster drops, loose gravel roads, barrels thrown by a gorilla rolling down make-shift wooden constructions (No. Wait. THAT’S Donkey Kong). In any case, Wifey met with an Italiana Pony Express load of problems that her Atlanta city upbringing didn’t prepare her for and apparently came close to dying more times than Abe Vigoda.

“And then,” she recounted with wide eyes, “there was one point where I thought we would fall off a cliff. The horse sorta slipped. And I actually said a prayer out loud. The problem was that I didn’t know which prayer I said out loud. So, right before we were about to die, I think I ended up wish our guide, my friend and myself a Happy Hanukkah.”

It turned out she lived and wrote her own account of her week in Italy  — including her own account of the horseback ride) in her new role as a blogger for “All Things Garmisch.” You can find that here

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