Soon after arriving in Sydney, I had collected a bunch of tourist activity brochures from my hotel lobby.  When I saw that one of them was for a place where you can trail ride on horses, I was intrigued.  When I read that you can do "free range" riding at this place (called Glenworth Valley), I was quite excited.  So early in the week I made an appointment for a 3-hour ride on Sunday.

I left the hotel a bit early and drove up the Pacific coast towards the area where the stable is.  Below is one of the beaches I stopped at.

Here's a picture of the stable from an overlook on the road coming in.

The trails wind along a creek at the bottom of the valley.  I had to wait about 30 minutes after my scheduled time to start riding, because there was a huge group of Asian tourists they were dealing with.  Here you can see them getting the tourists set up to go on their guided ride.

At first I thought the ride was going to be miserable.  First, the guide who was supposed to explain the trail options to me and then let me go off on my own got caught up keeping his group under control, and dealing with a woman who fell off her horse (very gently, she more slid down to the ground and was fine).  Also, the number of flies was absolutely ridiculous.  Starting out from the stable, there were literally at least 50 and maybe even 100 flies just on me and my horse (Credence, a bay gelding).  Finally, early on I got into 2 or 3 giant battles with Credence where he would stop and refuse to take another step away from the barn, no matter how hard I kicked.

But, after 10 minutes or so I managed to pull away from that group as they stopped so the guide could check that their girths were tight... and I convinced Credence that I was the boss by slapping him on the rear with my hand,  and eventually the flies thinned out as we went farther away from the barn.  So, after 30 minutes or so, I was on my own, with no flies, and Credence was listening to me very nicely, we could repeatedly turn back towards and then away from the barn and he would only hesitate a little bit.  It was terrific!!  We (Credence and I) rode almost 3 hours, and it was so wonderful to be on my own, able to walk/trot/canter whenever I felt like, and take whatever trail I felt like, and the trails were beautiful.  Once I had convinced Credence he really needed to do what I wanted him to do, he behaved very well, he was energetic and acted up occasionally when he didn't like something, but I could tell it was all show, that in the end he was going to listen to me, and not bolt off back to the barn like he obviously wanted to.  Anyway, the ride brought back fond memories of trail riding back in Virginia on Skip, the horse I was leasing (though Skip used to get significantly more worked up than Credence ever did).

Below are some pictures of the scenery on the ride.  (Credence did not like standing still for long, so it was interesting digging the camera out of my pocket and taking the shots one-handed.)

This is one of the places the trail crossed the creek.

Here's the other creek crossing.

This is a small meadow where we cantered back and forth a few times.  Most of the trail was too narrow and rough to canter, so we didn't do all that much of it.

This is a picture of Credence.  When the horses get back to the stable at the end of the day, the stable hands just loop the reins over the saddle horn and let the horses go and they walk into the barn for dinner.  The stable hand threw Credence's reins over the horn and walked away, so there was no one to hold him for me so I could take a picture, and he was eager to get in to eat, so I had to hold him, then quickly take a few steps back towards the barn and snap the picture as he was walking towards me, which is why it isn't the greatest shot.

This picture is looking from the barn towards the trails and the road coming into the valley.  You can see one horse and rider coming back in along the road.  It was a beautiful day, as you can see, and was around 75 deg F.