Amy's Sunday "Road Ride"!!

Yesterday, Amy went horseback riding (her "church").  And not her normal hunter-riding, either.  At home in Pasadena, what she did (with her new horse-friend, Deanna) would properly be called a "trail ride".  Deanna (who we met through the HyTEA ex-pats group here) keeps two horses at a little "ranch", right here in Banjara Hills...which, as the crow-flies, is no more than a half-mile from our front door.  Aims and I walked up "just around the corner" (inside joke for Jane and Squint!) to the Hyderabad House Restaurant parking lot where Deanna picked her up.  The saddled up two small mares (Amy rode the little black and white one - he was about 14.2 hands) - and took off out of the "barn". 

Shortly after, as he was coming to pick me up for Church, our driver Naseer actually saw them riding.  If he had not told me, I might not have believed it.  I asked Naseer: "Really - - you saw them?  Where??

"On the road, sir!" was his answer!

Evidently, the "Banjara Hills Version" of a "trail ride" is much more like a "road ride"!!  Amy said it was actually much more like a "freeway ride on the 405 in heavy, speeding traffic"!!  You see, a majority of their ride yesterday morning took them directly out onto our main thoroughfare: the famous "Road No. 2" - - complete with it's scarily-narrow passages on the shoulder, (and that's in a car!) - workmen in cement trucks driving directly toward the horses and riders, the ever-present little yellow taxi rickshaws weaving quickly in and out between the oncoming cars and buses, speeding motorcycles (one was ridden by a young boy, who was tentatively balancing a wooden pole on which were hanging about 100 dead chickens, dangling by their feet!), little kids running at the horses to pet them, and the occasional vicious-looking street dog.

You know, Tracy and Rebecca...just like a quiet day at Windsong or Sunnybrook!  Annette...it was just like a quiet summertime trail-ride in Sycamore Canyon in Malibu! Marion...think a nice winery-tour on horseback through the vineyards of Napa!!  NOT!!!

To be perfectly honest, although she is just fine...Suzanne thought that she would surely die right there.  Thank God for helmets!!  And thank God that these little mares are 100% "bomb proof" - they spook at NOTHING!!  Eventually they turned up a slightly-less treacherous side-street and rode for an hour and a half, weaving in and out of the little neighborhoods here in B.H. 

Evidently, Amy Suzanne must have liked it.  Deanna picked her up today at 6:30 - and they are at it again!!

"Horse People".  You gotta love 'em.  I do.  Especially mine!