Thanks to Mrs. Carolyn Mason (President of the Shackleford Wild Horse Foundation), whom I am extremely, extremely grateful to, I was able to see actual wild horses up close and personal on Saturday. It was definitely an experience I won't be forgetting any time soon (or later for that matter). As those of you who saw that I uploaded a gazillion photos, I'm sorry I'm just so incredibly excited that I got some decent pictures. It was so worth the two hours of travel to and from Beaufort (not to mention the freezing temperatures I was too stupid to really prepare for during our boat trip to the island). I'm very thankful to Mrs. and Mr. Mason, who really went out of their way to help me with my school work. I couldn't have had such an amazing experience without them.
For those of you who are kinda in the dark, Shackleford Banks is an island on the Outer Banks of North Carolina (USA) that is reserved specifically for the wild horses who have been there for hundreds of years, before colonial times. It's believed that they escaped from shipwrecks and failed colonies over the years and made their homes on the islands of the Outer Banks. A law was passed that protects the horses and gives them their rights to remain on the island, which is totally devoid of almost any man-made structures, including homes or even a small shack. The same law that keeps them on the island, however, also limits their numbers; which is why the foundation takes horses off the island periodically and through a painstaking process of carefully choosing which individuals get taken off and which mares receive a harmless birth control.
I could go on for a while here (I had to write an eight or ten page paper on the subject), but you sorta get the picture, right? Anywho, I had an amazing time and learned a whole lot of new information. The horses also became more than a research topic for me. Actually seeing them made me go, "Leaping lollypops, Batman, these horses are the real deal here." I think I learned more just by going out and seeing them first hand than I did by writing ten pages on them. It's nice to actually find school work I can get passionate about instead of the usual crap that I don't see myself using or needing ever in my lifetime. Like whether a prepositional sentence is adverbial or adjectivial (sorry to those of you who are saved by such intensely deep grammar on a daily basis...or were saved by it even once in your life- my opinion doesn't really matter, so just ignore it if it offends you...not that I'm trying to offend you......you get the point).