Ponderosa Trail Ride at Pineville, Missouri and Sage

My friends and I are the only tent people in the whole campground and it's 90+ and humid in the afternoon. All the people with air conditioned rigs head for air conditioned naps after our noon meal. My two traveling companions with their bumper pull trailer head for this tiny little tree and drag their chairs and hover underneath the "wide" canopy of shade provided by a short 2 year old tree.

Not me. I drag my extra special Wal Mart air mattress...with the flocked top...out of my tent and put it under the pickup and the gooseneck. I hate to disconnect the trailer from the truck, besides there's millions of hay bales in there that I would have to move. This works pretty good, except that the truck has a regular trailer hitch sticking out and there's not too much room for a body between the bumper trailer hitch and the thing that the gooseneck rests on when it's off the pickup...and the sun is shining straight down...no shade peeking on the side of anything. I am able to wedge myself in there and take a nice little nap with only a few scrapes from banging into a hitch. I feel pretty special and rested with my wondrous flocked air mattress.

Three oclock comes and the heat abated enough to make me want to get one of the horses out of the stall and do something. I kick the air mattress securely under the trailer and go get Sage. I tie her to the side of the trailer where I can't see her and proceed to clean out her stall. After a while, I knew I should check to see whether or not she had tangled in her rope, so I walked around to the other side of the trailer.

There was Sage...in no trouble with the lead rope, but her two front feet were standing right in the middle of my air mattress! Scream! She had dug the air mattress out from underneath the trailer and stood on it .. on the flocked part!

I ran over and cleverly moved her feet so no more feet stepped on it. I took it over to a nice grassy place and flopped down on it and it was just fine...inflated...comfy. Horse life went on in the campground and we had our evening trailride. After dark, we sat outside and chatted when finally it was time to hit the air mattresses.

I crawled into my tent, getting all my stuff organized for tomorrow...where's the flashlight...where's the book...reading when I noticed that I was no longer supported by air. It was around 11:00 and I was laying on the hard ground. G R O A N. I tried to sleep on my pillows, but that's a poor excuse for a mattress and I gave that up about 2:00am. Finally, I slithered out of my tent and went to the pickup. I was being exceptionally quiet and thowing everything from the front seat to the back, when I was yelled at by my husband...a non rider who was sleeping in the goose-neck part of the trailer. He had woke up and felt the trailer shaking and thought someone was stealing the pickup. We have these little slit like windows in the trailer, so he was unable to peek out and see just what was happening, so he YELLED, "Just what do you think you're doing there!!!"

I was shocked that he would talk to me in such a loud voice at that hour of the morning, so I just went shhhhhhh! Of course, he's hard of hearing and didn't recognize the shhhh to be my voice! ha! So he yelled the same thing out AGAIN! I ran back to the trailer and looked at him square in the flashlight and told him once again to shhhhh! He was then able to tell it was me. The next morning at breakfast he was telling everyone that he thought the pickup was getting ready to be stolen and there he was minus any clothing socked away in the trailer!

What a great night's sleep we all had that night and it was all Sage's fault!

The dear sweet husband did travel to the local Wal Mart the next day and got me another air mattress!

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