As WEG drew nearer, tensions started mounting. I, the person who only stopped eating when she had the stomach flu, lost my appetite. I kept waking up in the middle of the night and frantically creating lists. The horses grew tired of our constantly braiding their manes and adjusting their flysheets, worn to keep coats from fading in the harsh Wisconsin sun.
But even after the lists were made, suitcases packed, and manes perfectly coiffed, there was more business to figure out. After all, the Sound of Music would not be complete without a full cast, and the Middleton crowd made up a good portion of the characters. We had the five members of the vaulting team (all Von Trapp children), our lunger, an extra Von Trapp child, two Nazis, a nun, Ingrid, Carlo, and I (one of the many Marias), plus three sets of parents. We were a bit of a mob, but somehow we managed to sort people into cars and plan our departure. We were scheduled to perform Wednesday through Sunday of the first full week of the Games and planned to leave Monday morning. The full cast would descend upon Rachel King's farm by mid-afternoon Tuesday so that we would be ready to enter the park Wednesday morning.
The trailering arrangements were a bit confusing, but for the trip down, I would take Ingrid's mares Liebste and Vanessa plus forty bales of grassy Wisconsin hay (a gift for Rachel King) and Ingrid would take Brenda's mare Maltessa, Stefanie's mount. I drove a borrowed truck and Ingrid's four-horse trailer, while Ingrid pulled her two-horse camper trailer with her truck. Kate, Emma, and Maddy accompanied me in the truck, along with plenty of food and a James Patterson book on CD. As the HOW Youth Director, I felt it necessary to censor the racier parts of the book for the younger audience, but overall, we were entertained and enthralled for the entire trip. Our journey got a little more exciting than we had wanted when we got into the heart of Lexington farm country; evidently, the roads there are built for vehicles with the approximate width of a tandem bicycle. Not exactly trailer-friendly, which is especially fun when you're trying to find an unfamiliar farm in the dark. But Ingrid, the queen of travel, got us to our destination safely, and when we punched in the code on the gated farm (yes, gated farm!!! How awesome is that??), we finally arrived at Deer Haven Farm.
Rachel, the perfect hostess, greeted us, and by 10.00pm, everyone expected to arrived had done so, the horses were tucked away in beautiful stalls and paddocks, and we worked on tucking ourselves away. I stashed some girls in the truck, others on the camper floor, and crawled happily into bed with Ingrid. To her dismay (and my secret delight), we didn't listen to National Public Radio into the wee hours of the night, but both managed to get some much-needed shuteye.
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