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[RC] Part 1A Biltmore & Flood Adventure - Darolyn ButlerBarefoot at the Biltmore Challenge 2009 When we decided to make the 2200 mile round trip haul to the Biltmore Challenge this year, we didn’t even begin to know what a challenge it would become. The riders in this trip included daughter, Cecilia Butler-Stasiuk, Enrique Searle Martinez (an Intl. rider from The Spring ride season had kept us really busy with attending rides at least every two weeks with as many as 18 horses at one competition. The thing that initially made Biltmore tough was we had the big Bluebonnet Challenge Ride the very weekend before we were to leave for Biltmore on Tuesday. So as soon as we came off that trip with 12 horses, we started stripping trailers and repacking daughter CeCi’s trailer for the trip. We were taking 7 horses, (one to be delivered to a new buyer in N.C.) so my LQ trailer was out of the running, and although we could fit the 7 horses in my 4-Star, it didn’t have the, at least, minimal living area that CeCi’s and husband Jason’s
did. So that meant the daunting job of sifting through my two personal trailers and the storage sheds for everything one needs for a week long trip on the road as well as the accruements for 6 competing horses. By Monday afternoon, saddles and tack had been pulled and lined up in the barn hall; a cafeteria table was laden with all the other goodies, lanterns, electrolytes, blankets, etc to be loaded in an orderly fashion on Tuesday morning followed by an early afternoon departure. Then mother nature struck. We had been having fairly continuous rains for two weeks and the ground was seriously saturated already when on Monday night storm after storm here in the look for Part 1A
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