Arrival

I made it to Greg's, not terribly late after all thanks to my handy GPS (Garn's Phone Service). Pulling into the driveway beside the beautiful old barn after my rather convoluted journey, I couldn't help but think 'heaven on earth'. The house just past the barn was gigantic, new and modern (but made to look old and weathered in its way), the location splendid and the barn quiet but full of promise.

I entered the breezeway to the refrains of a little dreadlocked Cocker cross and soon found Gregory Finseth, proprietor. We chatted a bit and Greg introduced me to the horses in his care, each happily munching hay and leaning over their doors to look along the shedrow and see who had arrived.

Greg struck me initially as a genuine horseperson and a kind and gentle man, intelligent and friendly but also a little reserved. No matter, I thought, we'll have plenty to talk about if we're talking horses.

Going down the shedrow and meeting everybody, I came to be introduced to a skinny, rather-the-worse-for-wear dark bay gelding with a gorgeous face (and very sad eyes) that I was, with good reason, warned about. Having been at the track myself, I didn't think much of the admonition about mouthiness, etc. I just kept out of the way of the mouth and made a friendly overture to the resident troublemaker. I lived to tell the tale of course, but let's just say that the young man was less than polite with his response to my greeting. He was obviously a bit nuts, decidedly underweight, totally without manners and thoroughly a special case. My kind of horse.

As trite and stupid as it sounds, I made a connection with him the moment I saw him. I have no reasonable explanation for why or how this happened, except that I know it did. His fuzzy, skinny little neck and legs sticking out of a blanket, his marauding mouth, his general sadness, his loneliness, his hurt. For whatever reason, or reasons, we met and it happened that we connected somehow on that day and thankfully not through teeth or hooves.

Of course, there were other horses to see and other connections to be made. I met Greg's own horses and the other New Stride kids in care there before we traveled to what I would later know as "Wynn's barn". Here I found myself on another stunning property with a beautiful old barn this set on a hillside with views of the valley below and Mt.Baker off in the distance. Oh, and a vineyard - more heaven on earth. I was starting to believe that I had made a very good decision when I contacted Greg about volunteering.

At Wynn's we brought the New Stride horses in from their spacious paddocks to the immaculate stable and I got to meet the horses I knew so well from my visits to the website. My two online favourites were Nash (True Face - and never a horse more aptly named, as I would later discover) and the gorgeous and slightly overwhelming Platinum Trick - as ginourmous and sensational as he promised to be from the website; fresh and fancy on the lead line with me all the way up the lane to his stall. I was immediately in love with him and he went up on my desktop at work first thing the next morning.

I was definitely coming back.