Christmas Vacation

Well, my initial Christmas break, a 10 day road trip to Baja did not work out. Within two hours of realizing the deadness of my Mexico trip, Momo had gifted me frequent flyer miles and I had an itinerary to travel to VT for break. Total dream. There is heaps of snow, many friends, a clean, dry, warm house, Switchback, Jay, Cassidy, my favorite hairdresser, and the list continues. I was not planning on heading back east until May. I don't know if it was a self challenge or what. Sort of like when I would travel abroad and never call home- what was the point? Prove toughness? Unclear. Right now I am biding my time in Lakeview before driving to Reno (like the Johnny Cash song) to gamble away the $100 my grandparents sent me and catch a redeye to BTV.

As you can imagine this trip home has put me in a good mood. This weekend was filled with South Central Oregon adventures. Highlights include:

• sweet, sweet snowshoe in Freemont National Forrest, at about 6,000 feet
• getting the nerve up to go to the bar on a Saturday night with the cowboy
• meeting a graduate of my neighboring alma mater in VT, a '67 Colchester Alum
• hearing rap music including the Nate Dog/Eminem song in a cowboy bar and me being the only one who thought it was funny
• every man in the room singing, full volume to Folsom Prison
• approaching an older guy who was missing a front tooth, who I thought was my neighbor's husband, turns out Dennis was only dating her when her husband was still in prison, he is the one who gave me the ugly, ugly chairs for my house that continue to sit on my front porch, he also asked me to flip with him, $1 a bet, the cowboy was like no, erin don't do it, I did it, I won the first flip and then lost the last three, and I had to buy him a beer. This guy Dennis is crazy.
• spending all day yesterday with the cowboy, we went on a 6 mile horseback ride, we moved the horses from a ranch he works at to California, it was beautiful, and very scary, I trotted a little, we rode over someone else's land and go yelled at, we watched a pickup with 20 bales of hay feed 100ish cows/steers/whatever
• during the horseback ride I was doing my best to look the part: boots, old jeans, corduroy jacket, leather gloves. I asked the cowboy if I looked like a cowgirl and responded, "No, you look like somebody at a dude ranch." A dude ranch is where people pay money to work. He couldn't understand this and then said, "I would never pay you to let me work on a computer."

Anyway, a great weekend. I did take photos of the ride and will post them at a later date.