Today, Katie and I stuck our pale, bugbite-riddled city legs in the stirrups and went on a trail ride with our awesome new girlfriends Becca, Maria, and Wiebke.

We were thrilled at the chance to get to gallop freely through the Costa Rican pastures, feeling the wind in our hair, the sun on our skin and the extremely hard saddle under our butts.

The horses were maybe less thrilled.

Ok, and maybe Katie wasn’t exactly ‘thrilled’ either.

But I was.  And this is my post, so I can remember it however I want.  So, hah.

It turned out to be a truly fantastic day.  At seemingly every bend in the trail, we’d come across something that made me so eternally grateful that I’d decided to grab my camera, after all.

Such somethings as this:

And this:

Just keep it movin’, sister.

And this adorable little guy…

whose large, less adorable mom arrived on the scene with a quickness. Fortunately, she ended up being a really good sport about us camera-stalking her child.

We even spotted capuchin monkeys!

There he is!

Ok, technically Weibke did all the spotting.  I’m not entirely sure I would’ve known how to spot a capuchin (or even what a capuchin was) even if I’d had a pair of binoculars and a Spotting Capuchins for Dummies handbook.

In the end, we got to see some amazing things and no one was bucked, bitten or trampled.

Even Katie was a happy cowgirl.

It was a supremely fantastic day that we’ll remember for a long, long time to come.

Which is about the amount of time it’ll take us to walk normally again.

Yipee-kai-yay, y’all!