Horseback Riding!

One of the activities we did last Saturday was horseback riding... I LOVE horseback riding! The morning of the riding was spent planning how to get us 20 girls to and from horseback riding. The girl who made the plans got sick on Friday and did not get travel plans completed. Not too many bus routes go to Helensville from West Harbor, so we had to find times to work. The next problem was once the bus stop we would get off at was 5.1 km away from the horseback-riding place. We called the horse place to make a later appointment because it was the only bus time, and they offered to drive a van and make trips to pick us up! Thankfully after trying just about everything we had made a plan! Some of the girls have never ridden the bus before so they struggled. I am glad we have so much experience with the bus and know most all of the drivers!

We all met at the Westgate shopping center, all but one! My family loaned us one of their cell phones so we could call the horse place for the van when we got there. I was able to call our director on the cell and tell her who was missing. She was able to find her and meet us just in time.

When we got there, we had about a 30-40 minute wait until our ride because of the timing with the buses and the owners of the ranch conveniently had little Shetland ponies that they let us go and pet. They are such cute, fat little ponies!

Once we were ready for the riding, I chose a beautiful brown and white spotted horse named Apache. He was a bit grumpy, but overall a pretty good horse. The scenery was absolutely amazing and apparently the people owned over 500 acres of land that we could ride around on. It was beautiful.

One of the girls in our group was riding Philip from The Chronicles of Narnia! It was Edmunds horse! Two other horses were also in the movie, but one just in the background and one actually knows how to play dead and played a dead horse in the movie!

Since we were in charge of making all the travel plans, when our director had 2 seats left to head home, Kirsten volunteered her and I to go. All the girls were a bit jealous because they had an hour wait for the bus and a long bus ride ahead of them, but we needed to get home anyways. We got ice cream from one of the fruit markets on the way home. I chose a boysenberry ice cream flavor. They put in a rectangular chunk of ice cream and they pour in the berries, and then put it through something that swirls them together! It was uber delicious!

Once we got home Elyse took us out to La Porchetta for dinner. It is a fairly priced, semi-casual, Italian restaurant. I got Italian pasta that had chicken and mushrooms… can’t remember the name, but man it was good! Just a little tad-bit of interesting info: New Zealand includes tax in all prices, which seems really nice because you know the exact cost. They also round their price and do not have once cent coins. Ten cents is their lowest currency so any price is rounded! Another thing about being here is you don’t tip the waiters/waitresses! You don’t tip the waiters or hairdressers or anything else for that matter. Elyse says they make enough hourly, you do not tip! Interesting huh?

We got back to the house and Brooke and Kirsten (some of the other BYU girls that live the closest to us) came over for girls’ night. We tried some new lollies (candies/chocolates), while we watched Just Like Heaven. After that, we stayed up until after midnight, which is extremely late for me, sharing life stories and then crashed!