Today was my group’s last riding session till November. 🙁 I had a new, wonderful horse, but a really bad saddle I had a couple of weeks ago whose stirrups twist my bad leg. So it was a rather 50/50 ride, half great fun on a good horse and half agony no matter how much our guide tried to adjust to adjust the stirrups. It was a gorgeous walk on the beach with the super high rough waves beside us and almost no one out since swimming is prohibited.

We only rode one hour, but made it count with a lot of cantering. Even though my stirrups sucked, I felt safe on the horse and went at it, hanging onto the pommel for dear life since my stirrups weren’t worth anything! 🙂

My guide didn’t like my dismounting technique and tried to show me how to do it. I cobbled together enough Spanish to tell him that I have a bad knee, he has a bad saddle, and I couldn’t dismount properly because my leg had seized up. I hope I didn’t make him feel too badly and I emphasized that I still had a great time!

We all gave him an extra 100 pesos as a thank you gift and he was quite touched. He refused to give me a goodbye hug, saying that we are going to see each other on Isla in the next month. He’s such a good guy.

After riding, my friend S and I went to Carmelita’s to meet ‘her’ jewellery guy. I had mentioned to her on Saturday that I’ve been looking for a snake ring for years. I stopped biting my nails in December 2011 and after the one-year mark, I wanted to buy myself a ring to celebrate. But I don’t like to just go out and looking for something like that; it has to find me.

So whenever I ran into silver jewellery vendors, most notably in Nuevo Progreso and Pensacola Beach, I shopped hard, to no avail.

The problem is I know what I want and I won’t spend money until I find it. I was looking for a snake and had a very particular idea of what I wanted said snake to look like.

So S told her jewellery guy that her friend with big fingers was looking for a snake ring and he said that he would bring a selection with him for me to look at today. That would give him an idea of what I’m looking for and he could search in greater depth if I didn’t like what he had.

Well, he had one that not only fit, but that I liked! It’s a bit bigger than I had in mind and it is not real silver, so it’ll only last so long. But I got it for just 100 pesos (down from 150), which is a very fair price.

This one will do just fine until a real silver one finds me. And who knows, I might have slightly smaller fingers when it does. I have dropped a whole ring size (from nine to eight) since I started looking!