Interview with Scout's Trail - Scout and Michelle

And I think I did as well from, decades of rescue work and stuff like that and so we decided because we both loved the travel we had traveled internationally for about four years before maybe between her ages of 6 snd 10 we love to travel and we thought we needed to change your life so we sold all of our possessions and sold our home and we purchased a camper and truck and horse trailer.

So we have like a mobile, tiny home and tiny barn on wheels and we loaded three dogs and three horses into that and we've been seeing America by horseback for almost two years now.

The reason we have her as scout used to have a pony that went blind and had her eyes removed and although Scouts still rode Daisy on the trails at home, she couldn't live in with the other animals.

So we rescued a Rudy and then when Daisy died, Scouts started riding headed Rudy and because we keep our animals forever for the most part, we had three horses when we left so she came along and she's quite the character and then we also, he lives up to his name, he had a huge part in Scouts beating anxiety.

He's the only horse we've ever purchased all the rest of the rescues, but as really well-trained with great and had no fear of anything and that was joker and his an extra talent, which we found after we purchased him was every time scout got panicky or afraid when she was riding him, he would immediately do something funny. It was something completely harmless.

He might pick something up or just do something really silly and goofy and it would break her thought of whatever it was making her afraid. And it would make her laugh and because she would then start laughing, her anxiety would disappear. So joker was amazing and we have since switched horses and, you know, there's a long list of horses that have helped scout over the past two or three years and our journey to beat anxiety. And she rode joker for about a year. Okay. And then we made a switch.

So those are our, that's our Little herd well, tell them about our dogs. Well, we currently have two dogs puking Taya kinda is a approximately 11 year old shit zoo, who we originally rescued to be a service animal, but that didn't work out. So we decided to keep her, and now she rides in the saddle, which if you follow me, you will usually see pictures of her looking off in the saddlebag. Then we also have a four year old.

This is a tongue twister, Portuguese Podengo oh I've seen it kenya, is that how you say it kaya.

So when you sold your home and you've got the horses and you've set off what was going through your mind, how did you decide which area to go to first.

It was of course near the salmon river and it has a two acre obstacle course built by someone called mark bowl, Lander to simulate riding in the Sierras and we spent three weeks there working on the horses, getting them not afraid of things and just getting everyone more confident in braver and then we just went on from there once our three weeks.

There was a story about the horses or healing, and you were saying Michelle, about how they've healed you and you've recently found that people that have crossed your path, they're having a similar effect with them. Would you like to share some stories?

And we really enjoy we're with them 24 7 you know, they live, sometimes we camp in a pasture and they sleep at night right next to our camper and they scaled loves it. They, they treat us like a drive-through they'll come up and stick their faces in the window and expect carrots to pop out. So it's just a whole new relationship with your animals when they, when you live with them like this, even when they lived in our backyard, it wasn't the same as this.

So the connection becomes even stronger and you just know what they're thinking, you know what they're wanting, you know what they're telling you and they, they know what you need and the horse, it's been very fun to watch through over the past two years, how they have pushed scout at the right moments when she was ready to do certain things all of the horses, and now that she really doesn't need that anymore, she can ride any of the horses anywhere we go anywhere in this country.

We've ridden in deserts and mountains in rain and snow on cliff trails, I mean not that she necessarily loves them all but we ride highly technical things. We go into the wilderness by ourselves with no knowledge other than research and maps that we have and you know, she's just very well equipped and confident now.

And what has come to my mind is people have started coming in our path which we love, that for no reason, we cross paths with somebody who we're meant to be with we're meant to meet and whether we're just friends for a short time, or some people are going to now be lifelong friends here they are.

And usually had a Woody is the nucleus of that and we took somebody on a ride last week that just was in town that doesn't live anywhere near here and just by chance stopped in and hopes of meeting Scout and we just felt a great energy about her and this has happened with other people and we invited her to come riding with us, the day we went to the wild horses and she was able to come and she needed healing that day.

We didn't know that when we invited her and when we look back at all the people woody has taken for a ride, I would say 95% of them needed healing from moody and it's pretty magical, so now all of our animals are helping others that their kind of work is almost done with us, although they keep good maintenance on,

During lockdown last year, I was so lucky that where I keep my house, they literally said, come stay with us, you know and then at least you're in one area you can get to do your horse. So I stayed that and I camped out for a few days and I spent, which is what I always wanted to do with, with my own horse. So I camped out and then I just loved it and you could hear the horses, snorting and moving around in the night, you could hear the foxes and it was it was lovely.

It was on the farm, so we didn't go anywhere but it was just, it was something that I'd love to have done and even if it was just in your backyard and it was, it was still special and there was moments when you spend with your horses, just sitting with them and just doing nothing.

It's like a silent communication, there's healing going on, there's an exchange, which you walk away and you don't know why, but you just feel better and I love that, so I can imagine much in that, the people that come in to contact with you have this similar experience and go away feeling inspired, definitely. So Scout tell me about your book, how did that come about?

I do something called unschooling, it's experiential learning, so instead of sitting down at a desk doing curriculum, I took an online class of how to write books and I worked for a publisher and I worked with an editor and I had to write down what I wanted the pages to look like and we just kept working together, until I thought the pictures were perfect illustrator, that was an illustrator. And then four years later, we got my book printed just this January.

That was my blind pony Daisy or Puck the dog in real life is Puck the dog in the book. Maybe scout didn't think about this at the time but I think about it a lot, she started this book when she was 8 it was right about the time she started struggling with friends changing and moving apart and interactions changing and she had a lot of bad experiences that really made her sad and unhappy.

So the book is very much about friendship and working out differences and not bullying, so it's a really beautiful story and I don't think she necessarily meant but that's how she was feeling and ever since she was born, she just played with toys and creating stories.

She's always making up stories, she's a born storyteller and I think that this book came from that place where she was, which was the reason we actually started this journey and this book did take a long time but it's fantastic and everyone should take a look at it because I think you'll love it as a really nice messsage to teach and she's a very gifted storyteller and writer. She has a second book, tell them about your second book and how that happened.

When I was six, we started traveling internationally and the first place we ever went out of the country was Mongolia and while we were in Mongolia, we didn't want to go to all the tourist places we wanted to, you know, authentically travel around.

So we had an interpreter and a guide with us and while we were staying on one of the girl camps, there was this girl that lived, that helped out in the girl camp that lived down there, like down this Prairie hill from us and we kind of just picked her up as we went and she traveled around with us while we were staying back. And her name was Timna so and she was my age and she was about my age.

When I started writing books at the same time that I was writing this, I took another online class at the same person on writing a Cinderella story but in a different culture style, so I chose Mongolia and I called my book, which I am actually illustrating myself digitally at the moment called Timna mill, Mongolian Cinderella.

They don't get mail or they don't have internet, so they just move four to eight times a year when their herds of animals move because of the time of year, they pack up their things and change okay.

Stephanie, that's all you need to say for her to then prove that, oh no my daughter will walk and so they were amazing dedicated parents, I remember seeing them go out with their daughter on a. trycilcle called and would push the pedals round and round for her because she wasn't strong enough to do it herself.

Now she competes in special Olympics on a tricycle but when she was six, I trained the dog for her and Danielle named the dog Walker because that dog was going to become her Walker So with the dog walking at her side, she was able to, by the time, I'm not sure the exact age, but I know her a goal in life was for her to graduate from high school and walking independently down the aisle.

And she did so that is who Stephanie is, they are amazing parents with an amazing little girl that are part of a life of mine decades ago.

We don't generally tell people ahead of time, basically, it's for safety that like we're headed, it's she's exactly right, there are many days that the day before we don't know where we're going and the reason we started doing that is it helped with anxiety. So if you don't have a date where you have to be at a certain place at a certain time when you don't get there, you not I anxious about not making it. So a lot of our life was managed in a such a way to reduce all anxiety.

When scout had a lot of anxiety, there's a lot of criteria to what we could and could not do every day, whether it had to do with traveling, camping, riding other people around us and, the travel plans was part of it and we've kept that even though her anxiety has gone, because we enjoy if you make a plan that goes somewhere and then the weather's going to be bad, who really wants to go there because we're not on vacation.

So we try to always go where the weather is nice, we're headed tomorrow and then where we're going to head later this week is because we've gotten invitations. So people will now invite us to visit them. so if we happen to be in that area and the weather's good, then we'll take that opportunity to go visit if it works out for everyone.

So we really are just nomadic like 10 Timna and we travel around by happenstance weather opportunity, where we are now, we were originally coming for four days and I think we'll end up having stayed for six weeks, so, it's not predictable, you know of course broken down before, which is never fun, but when we don't have to be anywhere, okay. Where we break down is where we're going to be.

there's always someone in someplace in something that's there to help us when we need it and we just enjoy our circumstances in the moment and not try to strive for something we thought we were supposed to do cause there usually isn't anything where we are.

And for Scout it's just her normal life you know, we ride in a lot of spectacular places we're very fortunate but we do so many things that, you know, it's just hard to remember it all and we were in South Dakota last summer and we were in the black Hills and we were, I don't even think, I guess we had, I don't know if we had horses or not, but it doesn't really matter.

But as we were driving out of Custer state park, right through the heart of the park, where all the tourists go, there were four giant bus bison laying on side of the road, like almost touching negatively and the next day I was telling her brother about it and she was in shock because she had no memory that we drove by his bison that would be four then we had written on the Centennial trail on a pack trip and we'd seen hundreds and hundreds of bison.

So I guess to her seeing four on the side of the road wasn't a big deal. Cause she rode through herds of them on horseback but I was kind of funny. her memories and I'm surprised you haven't asked this yet but that's good because it means you have original questions, but everybody wants to ask us what is your favorite ride I wasn't going to work.

They want us to say some trail and Scout will never say that usually because what makes rides favorite for her are we met somebody very special or we rode with somebody special or we did something fun. So because the like beautiful bucket-list rides are, I think just daily occurrences to her but we've had some amazing people we've written with. We've ridden our horses through drive-throughs, we've ridden them to get pizza and do you want to tell.

Two of my top favorite rides the first one we were in South Dakota, somewhere around Mount Rushmore and we wrote on this trail it's called, I Iron creek course trail. We were with two of our friends who we were staying with at the time we trailered them in with us and we were riding and I love water crossings, anything that I can cross my horse, safe land to water with. This one, it was an out and back ride are you going to come? We're going to go in and come back the same way.

And so it had 12 water crossings, one way, so 24 water crossings and the whole day and as we're crossing, one of the water crossings, we see these people off to the side and we got to the end of the trailer having lunch and this lady, the same lady who had this cute little lab and was walking for a friend, she walked up to us and she's like, ah, are you Scouts Trail yeah we are and she was a big fan of us apparently and we actually ended up becoming extremely good friends with her.

She rides Woody and like, she just gets her and would he get along great and moody loves her and her name is Cammie and we just love hanging out with her.

So that was probably my top favorite ride but my second favorite ride one of my big bucket list items was to ride through a drive through, on my horse and pick up my food and when we were staying in grand canyon state park, after we did the whole going to see the grand canyon on the rim and you know, doing all that we re when we were staying in the camp, we realized oh, there is a drive-thru in town a 20 minute ride away from us.

So we get on the horses, of course we have our one on Liberty horse in tow and we're just riding, we ride there and it was a Wendy's. So, so we get in there and there's, I mean, it's packed because it's like the town that is like, it's the grand canyon town. So they're all in there and everyone's there and it's just like a giant line. And we get in there like a car and we're all sitting there, we order it. And then we got to the window.

I didn't actually, I had to get off because there was, it just rained a few days before, and there was a puddle in front of the window and of course, my horse was too afraid to go up through a puddle, even though she can cross raging rivers up to her nose. I got our food, then there was a museum and some woods right there so we went behind the museum fence and we had our food and my course had got to have French fries and a frosty so that was fun, that was really fun.

Yeah we don't have things like that in the UK if you rode into town on your horse, you'd get a double look and there's no way to tie them. Maybe in the countryside but I mean the Dalles or somewhere the legs, but not in the town.

The roads in the UK a lot smaller than in the states and they are windy and tiny sometimes you can just get one car down We were driving our giant wide rig that's so long and we're just eyes on the road, someone else comes down the road of another rig because someone's going to be backing up and it's most likely gonna be them.

Then we'll come back inside, we'll have our food, then we'll go out and pick up their manure and give them their feedbacks with third grain supplements in them and then we might do an interview like today or you know, just rest around. Like in Arizona, we have siesta staff on pretty much every rest day or we'll go biking or swimming or hiking or go to a museum, whatever there is to do around us, if we can get to it easily for a ride day if where there's kind of, you tend to ride days.

If we are camping at the trail Well, get up, you know, go do the normal, depending on how long the ride is let's just say it's a normal day ride as we usually do. We'll get up maybe around seven 30 in the morning, we'll go out we'll give them their Hey, come back inside, have whatever breakfast we're having go out. When they're manure, give them their feedbacks, then we'll get our lunch ready. Then they should be done with that. And we'll go time up to the trailer, well, get them all tacked up.

Then we'll go out wherever we're going. If we have to drive to the trail head let's figure it out a couple of times since we've been here, basically the same thing in the morning, but we'll try to hurry up a little bit more depending on how far the car drive is. And then we'll, we'll get there. Do the same thing. Tack up. We have a slant led trailer, so we can't invent stalls are fairly tight. So we can't have their saddles on there. So we'll, so we'll get there.

We'll put yourselves on, get going a travel day. We're lucky since we've got so much to do, we try to get everything done a few days before but we've got so much stuff to get done. We're lucky if we get out by 10 30 in the morning. What our travel day looks like is we do the same thing as any other day. We'll most likely have our lunch already packed the night before and maybe have like a pre-made breakfast that we can just grab and eat.

We'll do the same thing as we do any other day, give the horses, their hay on the show, and most likely, already be set up for them, have their hay bags in there and maybe some grain bulls and then we'll get onto the roads. One of the things about a travel day is our rig, we have to put our rig together. Our rig consists of a truck, a truck camper and a bumper pull trailer. So for example, because we were here for six weeks, we put our camper on the ground.

So to get ready for a travel day, we have to first, we have to get our extension hitch on before we can put the camper on without the ball hitch. Then we slide the camper onto the truck, then we put the ball hitch on. We have a flatbed, so we don't have any sides. So we have boxes on the sides and wooden panels to keep it all on. So we get the boxes up, we put the walls up and then we go and hook up the horse trailer and then we're ready to go.

You know, before we put it on the truck, we had the pack up the inside. If we're already hooked up, will get up in the morning and put it together but because there was so much to do, we got the whole rig hooked up yesterday. Tomorrow morning we just need to close our slides and load the horses and take off and the important thing for us on travel days is we don't like to go very far.

In the beginning we would do long, hard days, and it's no fun for us or the horses and when we first started, you know, we weren't as confident. And so we would tend to use horse motels and campgrounds and have it really planned out ahead where we were going to go and stay and now two years later, We boondock a lot.

We can just pull over anywhere and set up we don't need anything and it's not common but it's not unusual that we would take off in the morning with a general sense of where we were going but not really know exactly where we were going to spend the night. We would go look at something and then maybe move and go find something better, if our online recon didn't pan out as we had hoped.

we try not to drive more than 300 miles in a day, that gives us time to set up, be done early or find a new location. If our first plan didn't work out. Such as like, when we stayed at the grand canyon, we had a plan to go somewhere, but we got there too late, we had to drive around to the other side of the neck of the and it was pitch black by then. So we just pulled in to a little parking area and we just kind of sat there for the night.

Then in the morning we got turned around and then we drove up the road about 15, 20 minutes and we found a nice place to camp with trees and shade.

over 20 years, I searched for lost people in the woods and participated in urban search and rescue at disasters and I did it with dogs. I did water rescue and rope rescue and I did ski patrol I also teach wilderness first responder classes still and am a wilderness EMT. So if someone gets in trouble in the woods, I'd typically be the person that would come to help.

I like to hope that I prevent us from having any accidents, because I know what can go wrong and try to be well-prepared to prevent something from happening. That's what I teach my students that if they come back to me in two or three years, they won't tell me about all the treating that they did, of the people they were guiding. They'll tell me how they didn't have to treat anyone because their knowledge prevented everything from going wrong.

And so that's what I try to do and to teach scout, to think critically and know what our risks are, and yes our life is riskier than most, but it's not taken lightly. We decide what and what may look risky from a photo that you see one of Scouts, social media. People have no idea how much preparation might have gone behind whatever it is we're doing and you know what our capabilities are. We're not the average trail riders. No you've got thought behind what you do in.

So we had purchased a small quantity of character stuffies from four of the characters in the book and we're going to give one away to anyone who can maybe take Scout's book into their local bookseller or local shop that sells books and show it to them, if that leads to a wholesale then we want to send them one of these as a gift in exchange for helping us grow Scouts book business.

just take your copy to a bookseller and the book is available on Barnes and noble and her publisher, which is still water books is there's a link to her publisher on Amazon and there's wholesale pricing for anyone that would like to sell her book in their shop. So we're encouraging that maybe her followers could help her get a bigger Salesforce by having people around the world, going into shops and maybe getting our books.

You must be so proud of a Michelle, scout you must be proud of your mom for whole experience in life that not many people would have the chance or would, or maybe not want to do.

I wanted to ride horses there and meet those people but the thought of planning a trip or even paying for a trip to Mongolia seems daunting and an unrealistic goal and the first thing you said is I could never do that. So my plan was, I bought one way tickets for the two of us to Mongolia. So I paid for them and now I'm committed, there's no way to not go, you're going to lose all that money and then over time, Found the guide and bought the next ticket to get the Japan.

They just did it little by little until I had taken us from New York to Mongolia all over the step in the Sahara desert to Okinawa, then to San Diego for a visit there and then back home and the whole thing lasted, lasted three or four weeks. You just have to do it and believe in yourself and not come up with limitations and reasons why you can't, because if you want to do something bad enough, you can do it. You just make it happen.

We rely heavily on not planning too much because what we need and where we need to be always. apears who we need to see always is in front of us and if we to try to plan too much, you would just plan yourself to death and never go because you thought you hadn't planned enough and then you'd have so much planning, it'd be hard to meet all the plans and the whole thing would be too stressful. We put in some some basic things and then we just let the rest flow and it always works out amazing.

Once you start doing it and it just gets it's easier and you just kind of learn as you go. When we first left on the road, I loaded our horse trip and with so much grain that I'm surprised the actual didn't collapse, which was so silly because in every time. In every place in the United States, there's a feed store and you can buy grain you know, I thought I had to take all this stuff with us.

We also stopped upon food because, you know, we had a giant house and we had a unfinished, ginormous basement bigger than our house. So we always stocked that at like, we grew our own food. We always stopped that up for like a store bought winter food. So we'd have food to survive us through the winter when we couldn't grow things. So we were used to having just a million, little things in there that we could go grab out from the store.

Once you get going, you just figure it out, but you just learn as you go. And if you're afraid to go, because you think you don't know enough, you'll never. You just learned it along the way.

I stayed in golden in Colorado and then I went to Cheyenne and then it went to where did it go next? I went to quite a few places and I thought, how the heck am I going to get there? I've got no transport. The day before I was thinking, perhaps I shouldn't go, perhaps is sign. I shouldn't go and my friend said your going and I haven't gotten enough money, she says, you going to go it will work out fine fine and in the morning and I felt sick.

I got on this plane I was good on my own, which didn't bother me cause I do most things on my own. I sat on this plane and I thought, well I'm going now and I managed to get to where I needed, I got a train and then a little bus and then I walked for about two hours to get to this place.

And then the next day I did manage to get some car hire but it was a few days later cause I got to Cheyenne on the Greyhound coach and I missed one I had to wait until midnight to get the next one and it was just such an experience, I met the most amazing people and the people I stayed were just so friendly and there was a couple of stayed with that didn't know me. It was a friend of a friend and she says, yeah, you can come and stay and I stayed with them and I ended up going ridding in.

She has barrel racing horses and I'd only just got back on my horse because of my own anxiety, nothing to do with horses but it just put a block on me and I'd got back on my horse, it was like, wow I've won the lottery. For me that was my own hurdle and then I was out riding in America for two hours on this barrel racing horse and it was wow, it was mind blowing but if I'd have planned it ,it was better than I would have planned the day before.

I wasn't even sure I was going to get there but it all worked out, it just worked. Yeah.

Day before I just Googled a horse stable near me or something, that's how we usually find things and I found this person, so in a trail riding place, but I think she was just a stable and we told her who we were and she came and we went to Hobbiton visited the whole place and she picked us up and she lived right there around hot-button.

So then we went horseback riding in the shier and it was amazing and then she brought us back to our Airbnb and yeah, things just happen, find the right people and you have experiences and it's a great way, that's how we do it and it works for us.

That got a little bit stressful when everything closed down and we didn't really know where we could go so that made us realize it'd be nice if we had our own place, we could just go to sometimes cause, many people who are full-time traveling, don't actually travel a lot. They might sit in one place or go between two places like a summer place in a winter place but we actually move all the time. Staying in one spot for six weeks is a long time for us.

We've only done this a couple of times, so we're always moving and we found that we do at least once or a couple of times a year, we'd like to just stop and pause and stay stationary, whether it's to work on writing or just to take a break, whatever the reason in the winter, just to be in one good temperature area. So we're still in search of where that place is.

We've kind of narrowed it down a little bit, but that's kind of the focus of this summer is investigating those places we think might be good. We've initially thought we'd find somewhere that would be perfect year round. And we now know that's not true. We need to find a place that's going to be nice.

Most of the year scout has a dream to do the Mustang make-over for kids and we need to have our own place to be able to do that but we still want to travel, we still want to go around with the horses. So that's kind of as far as our plan is, we're sort of in search of that perfect spot ,from what we've heard, Southwest Oregon is pretty good and I would like that. You should talk to just in Dunn he used to do the Mustang make-overs he used to live in Colorado. He's moved to North Carolina?

And he has a place with the Mustangs and he helps veterans but he used to work with children and summer camps but he has a facility and the veterans or people that are referred to him can go in and just be with the horses. And he lets them interact with the horse and leaves the horses sister to do the healing, to do the communication, it's quite fascinating.

We're headed to Perea river ranch in a couple of weeks and to answer the other half of her question, there's going to be some conversation about possibly doing some camps for kids.

I'm sure there's loads more stories and I'd love to hear, so perhaps another time down the road, we can catch up and see what you're up to and see how Scouts get in on, how long was he in there of scout by the way?

You invest in that energy and you draw something from it for yourself, whatever it is you need, it gives you inspiration to do what you want to do but maybe not on your scale thats I'm trying to say.