Looking Ahead.......
Play Time!
How about a fun and inexpensive night out? HONs and their significant
others are invited to play cards at the Henn’s house! Mark your calendars for Saturday, March 14th and plan to attend the annual HON Euchre Night. Arrive about 7 pm and bring along your own beverages and a snack to share. Shirley H lives west of Whitewater on Berg Rd. Please email or call her 262-473-5707 with your RSVP so she can get an idea of how many to plan for. Hope to see you there!

Trail News.......
Tales from the Trail
We have lots of people going to lots of interesting places. It’s fun to hear about all the adventures of our members as they venture out of our little world. Linda P. gets to start, since she and her husband just returned from a horse camping trip to Florida. Here’s what she has to say…… We left Jan 29 and got back Feb 14 from Florida. The first week was cold for Florida, highs in the 50s to 60, lows in the 20s several nights. The native Floridians were not happy about dealing with such a cold snap. I think for our horses with their winter coats it may have been a good thing. Second week we started hitting the 70s. We made it to Henderson, TN the first night and stayed at a private farm with overnight boarding. Tillus Hills horse camp in the Withlacoochee State Forest was our home for four days. They had beautiful 12 X 12 box stalls and also a large exercise paddock. The trails were color coded, most of the riding was flat and sandy thru pines, but closer to camp the trails were very tropical looking with palm trees and ferns. We then moved on to Fiddlers Green Ranch for six days in Altoona which is the south edge of the 300,000 acre Ocala National Forest. They had a large outdoor and covered arena, swim pool (too cold to use when we were there) and our horses were in a paddock about 75 X 150 feet with trees for shade and their own orange tree. The National Forest has 3 main trails marked but they are from 20-40 miles in length and the connector trails could easily get you turned around. So we were pleased our neighboring campers (four couples from KY & TN) were very friendly and invited us along to ride the trails. Most of them were retired, in their 60’s and 70’s and come down for weeks/months during the winter with their gaited horses. One couple, Mike and Linda, had Arabs and when we got on the trail, Dan enjoyed the challenge of trying to keep up with Linda, who was not only a warm-up jockey for the race track for Arabian horses, but was conditioning her new horse for 50-75 mile endurance rides. My horse, Sammy, was really racking out nicely that day, but all I could think about as flying by the edge of the marsh area was "this is probably when I'll see an alligator or bear laying in the trail." Trails varied in the National Forest – some were wide enough for a vehicle, others were barely wide enough to get thru with your horse. There were several lakes to stop by for your horses to drink and also water tanks placed along the trail. When done riding horse for the day, we did side trips to Juniper Springs, Daytona Beach (went up to my ankles in the 58 degree water), and a pontoon boat ride to see nature (the highlight being 3 alligators). Our next stop was Santos trailhead campground in the outskirts of Ocala on the edge of the Marjorie Harris Greenway Trails. In the 1960s digging was started with hopes of building a canal thru Florida from the Gulf to the Atlantic until someone finally figured out the salt water would ruin the fresh water aquifer. This area was returned to natural beauty green space and grown back with beautiful large hardwood trees and pines and devoted to hiker, biker and equestrian use. There is even the land bridge where you ride your horse over I-75. The trail also runs thru the Florida Horse Park, where they have the cross country course with obstacles and jumps. Ocala area has many large fancy horse farms, some with race tracks and about every breed of horse is raised in the area. We also did a stopover in the Live Oak (northern FL) area and enjoyed the Suwannee River Water Management land with their miles of trails many right along the Suwannee River with the large moss covered oak trees. We stopped over at a private horse farm in Cadiz, KY on our way home before returning to our Wisconsin winter.

News From Our Members .......
***** Babs H. , our beloved NOB (North of the Border) HON, has an update from her part of the world, the Canadian Plains. Her “Dog tale” is a sad one. Read it here.
***** Much sympathy to Louise H. on the death of her father recently. Losing a parent is so difficult.
*****Congratulations to Sherri T. on the arrival of her new grand-daughter. Maggie arrived on Monday, February 23 and is a perfect little bundle of joy.
***** Ann P recently shared this photo of her grand daughter, Cassie. Cassie’s family is in Mongolia where her mom works for the US Embassy in Ulaanbaatar. It was about 30 below zero when this picture was taken, but the little rider was quite warm between the camel's humps! They hope to go for more extended horse and camel rides... eventually when it warms up a bit! Yeesh! And we thought we had it bad here!