The joy horses gave us were a tie that bound our mother and us together.  The glue that held our divorced mother and us close for the remainder of our lives.

We spent many happy hours riding our horses together.

Like good ‘ole fishing stories, we shared plenty of horse stories.  The pinnacle of our riding days was the summer of 1976.  The Bicentennial Wagon Train was on the roll.  Five wagon trains re-tracing the five major wagon routes across the country were heading backwards.  Valley Forge, Pennsylvania was the hub we were riding towards.  Each state had an official wagon, and the Virginia wagon with it’s entourage was heading to our place, Endless Caverns in New Market, Virginia to bivouac for the night.

We led the Wagon Train into their camping grounds at the Caverns.

Our mother waving a happy hello, with three riders, and three important support team folks.

Our official Virginia wagon.

This month-long adventure was our mothers idea.  We were to take the month off from work, horseback ride through four states, 370 miles to Valley Forge, PA.  Five of us rode. Two, teen-age boys, we teen-age twins, and our 51 year-old mother.  We broke camp on a bright early morning in June of 1976, and headed north towards PA.

It was also there, at the Caverns, where our mother met and married, Carl T. Taylor.  He would soon take her on an adventure of a lifetime.  Though we did not know it at the time, our trails together

Our mother riding her last ‘big’ horse, Snip.

had come to an end.