Wyoming: I Came as a Cook and Stayed for Life!

It was 1996.  "I had to come for your wedding!  You are the only person from our third-grade class who grew up to do what you said you would do!"  True or not, 39 years as a solo traveler were coming to an end.  How did I get here?  As a grad school student who took a summer job as a ranch lodge cook looking to ride horses in Wyoming in my down time.  "You said you would marry a cowboy and you are!"  Probably did say that.  The first magazine I bought as a little kid at the Kentucky State Fair was a Western Horseman.  The first horse I tried to train as a kid was Sony.  The first horse I rode at riding school was a paint mare.  The horse I got when I was thirteen was a beautiful sorrel gelding I named Star because Santa brought him for Christmas.  Before it occurred to me to dream about boys, all I dreamt of were horses. The dream - to ride horses without fences.  Australia?  The American West?  Where didn't matter.  Horses and wide open spaces did.

Just shows the power of dreams that a kid in Kentucky, the thoroughbred capital of the world, can dream her way in a few decades to a new life filled with horses in Wyoming, USA.