Friday, September 24, 2010

2nd annual Happy Place weekend adventure

Where we go to regain our superpowers Part 2

2 weeks ago on the 2nd annual Van Horn Snyder Ranch working trip, we brought our friend Kathleen along, another cowgirl badass worthy of the sometimes rugged opportunities West TX present to me and Cal.
Ya know. Like cattle drives and braining large snakes.
These trips seem to coincide with particular friends who need the Snyder ranch experience for whatever personal things they happen to be going thru. It begs the questions whether we need to start some kind of re-programming girl power camp there complete with cattle drives, dirtbikes, sharpshooting, ghosthunting, texmex eating and honky tonk dancing.
We stay at Callie's spacious house in town in Van Horn and then make our way to the ranch about a half hour into more remote valleys mornings after consuming the best breakfast burritos at Daddy Snyder's shop.
He hops in the truck with us, downs a few beers and tell us some of the wildest west Texas tales we couldn't possibly ever dream up. Daddy Snyder lived them. Stuff of legend.
I have fallen in love with him. He calls me Bethany.

 


After a few hours of checking wells with him and soaking in the desert sun from the second tier of the quad hunting vehicle on this particular trip last month, we then went out and rounded up his ponies out roaming the land.

 

Daddy Snyder helped up saddle up and we started out on those horses, Just Callie, Kathleen and myself. Not 150 or so feet in to our journey, out of the sky dropped a bunch of multi colored balloons. I shit you not.

 
Kathleen started out full gallop to retrieve them. We could not really process the strange significance of this but Kathleen tied them to post and then seeing Callie;s horse was more “spirited” decided to switch horses with Callie. Kathleen was looking for action, and she got it. Upon returning from our rides, that horse got spooked by the balloons Kathleen went back for and threw her off right in front of us. The horse took off. Kathleen heard her arm pop, dusted herself off, shed one tear and walked back to the ranch house. I was shaken as I have a worst case scenario panic button, but Kathleen and Callie were calm. Well, actually, almost goofy. Daddy Snyder had tears in his eyes as we got in the car and headed to the ER in Van Horn. There was no one at the hospital and I joined in on the strangely silly vibe, stealing rubber gloves and stuffing them into random purses. Kathleen was bruised,potentially fractured,slinged, but NOT BROKEN. We went straight from there for tex mex dinner and brought our bottle of Tito's into the restaurant in leiu of pain pills. Later that evening we went back to our new favorite bar at the old famously haunted hotel El Capitan where we caught up with cowboys and a wayward singer songwriter who lent Kathleen his guitar for some of the most beautiful surreal moments I have ever experienced. Kathleen has somehting special going on with her music.

 

From there we brought those damn balloons with us to a Tejano bar still trying to prove our story to the cowboys, and since they only had beer and wine at said bar, and with me being a 100 percent Tito's girl, I danced the rest of the night instead-learning new Mexican dances with the cowboys and getting nasty stares from the local gals.
There's so much I must leave out for fear of a too long post, but you get the drift.
On the ride home back to Austin, we stopped at Balmorhea to heal our wounds and drove 7 hours watching the tropical storm roll in with wild cloud formations, rainbows and one hell of a sunset to be reckoned with. We are headed back in Oct. for the rodeo. Kathleen has a gig in that hotel bar , I'm going to sponsor the rodeo, and we are going to investigate the El Capitan








 

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