Just one of those days

Today's ride was okay.  Skippy and Zoe left the barn with 2 other horses following.  Zoe in front.  There was someone working behind one of the fences on Lomida, making strange noises but Zoe managed to listen to me, stay on the trail and kept going forward.   The 2 riders following us took a different trail.  Skippy took the lead and we were moving out.  Good experience for Zoe to follow a faster horse and have good trail manners.  She did pretty good.  We looped around some trails and found the 2 riders a few more times during our ride.  At one point we spooked a deer (our horses were fine), the deer bounded off towards the other 2 riders coming down a different trail that intersected our trail.  I called out "deer coming".....Lucky decided it would be a good time to lope and the rider said no, so the horse loped in place then calmed down.  We split up again, Skippy and Zoe going towards the rocks where the 4-wheelers climb and the other 2 riders headed towards the lake.  We stopped at the top to take some pictures.  (I need to figure out how to put more pictures on this blog.)  Now we put Zoe in the lead.  Took some big trails and small trails.  We were disappointed that 4-wheelers have played in the mud so much that the bigger trails are getting mushy.  We took the smaller trails towards home.  Now Zoe decided that trotting was a good idea, which was fine with me, but not the head tossing and not listening to my leg.  So we slowed down and when we got to a big road again, we got to practice circles, backing, sidepassing, stopping.  Soon her brains started coming back into her head and the reactive side was slipping away.  Back to a peaceful ride home.  Skippy took the lead on the way home...doing her usual Skippy fast walk.  Zoe got to practice walking fast...sometimes she was anxious that Skippy was fast so when we got back to KK we practiced some in the arena-practiced sidepassing, backing, trotting collected-weaving in and out of concentric circles.  Brain back in head again.  I'm glad we can get back to that point.
Back at KK we found out that all the other riders out on the trail had experienced their horses misbehaving to some degree.    Must be one of those days.  As one of my friends put it "tomorrow's another day".  No GPS on this ride.