I went back to Armidale to drop in on Aunty Sandy and Martin.

We met for lunch in Uralla on Saturday, then we all went back to the farm.  Aunty Sandy and I took Missy and Nipper for a ride on a fire trail she’d discovered from the national park, through some regrowth.

It was a lovely ride through eucalyptus, though there was one very steep section towards the end – Aunty Sandy had to control Missy, who just wanted to run down it, while Nipper just kind of slid down in a shower of gravel.  I was a bit worried when I felt him start to slide, but he wasn’t concerned, so I decided to see what happened, and he kept us both upright as he rode a mini-landslide down, so I can’t really complain.  Except to say that he’s a very weird horse.

Going back was a different story.  The horses both cantered up it, just because I don’t think they could make it up any other way.  Then we gave them a bit of a rest, because they were both panting pretty hard after that.

We arrived back at the house in good time to start dinner – we had it on the veranda, with an almost-full moon reflecting light off the dams.  Aunty Sandy took this picture:

I stayed overnight (with my winter pyjamas because Armidale has about a month of summer and then gets cold again), and we went riding again in the morning.  This time, we took an old bulldozer track around the hills in the back paddock, again through a nicely forested area, though this one had a very steep drop on our left side – real Man from Snowy River kind of stuff.  When the track came out in a valley, we made poor Missy and Nipper climb the hill instead of finding the road again.  We had a look at Lightning Tree (a tree struck by lightning – who’d have guessed?) before we went back to the house.

Since the horses had worked so hard and it was getting hot, we hosed them down before we turned them loose.  We also gave them some apples and carrots, just because they’d been good.  Nipper loved the carrots, but was less keen on the apples – he really is a weird horse.

Martin barbecued some sausages for lunch, and we were eating them when we spotted a duckling running across the yard.  It was all by itself, so Aunty Sandy went to catch it and put it in a box while we tried to find out where it had come from.  After driving around the property for a while, we found the dam we thought it had come from, so we set it free there.  I hope we were right – at the very least, the duckling seemed keen, swimming off like it knew what it was doing, so I’m just going to assume it all worked out.

Then, after all the excitement, it was time for me to head back to Tamworth.