Home from Sheridan
We are no longer building saddle trees. We have two saddle fit videos available on our westernsaddlefit.com website. Western Saddle Fit - The Basics, aimed at riders, is available either on DVD or streaming on Vimeo while the six hour series Well Beyond the Basics, aimed more for professionals but understandable by anyone, is available by streaming on Vimeo. (We left this website up because we have had many requests to keep the information available.)
Well, 3683 km (2302 miles) and almost 40 hours of driving later, we're home from Sheridan!
We really enjoyed our time down there, visiting old friends, meeting new people, lots of discussion about horses, saddles, trees, business and lots of other topics as well.
The show was really busy this year. Friday and Saturday morning were the busiest. Saturday afternoon dropped off a bit in traffic and Sunday is often slower, but then we had more time to chat and visit with a few people rather than having a lot of people coming by.
We took more time coming home than we did going down. We stayed Sunday night with Ben and Pam Swanke in Billings, Montana. Ben started building trees about the same time Rod did. We met in 1997 at the Sheridan show where they put the two of us in booths side by side. Pam had a tiny baby girl with her, the two older boys being cared for by grandparents that weekend. Now the two boys are not only graduated from school but have done some post secondary and one is even married! And the baby girl is in high school and a fun kid to talk with.
We left Swanke's just after 8 am and stopped on our drive home in Lewistown, Montana to visit with a saddle maker who took our seminar. Then a 1/2 hour wait to get through the border as it was a holiday Monday so lots of traffic coming back to Canada after visiting the US for a few days. We got to our friends' place in Calgary about 6:30 pm and had another good visit.
Yesterday we visited with another good saddle maker for the morning. Then we stopped in at Caledon Leather Sales in the afternoon to drop off a tree we built for them to sell that we had taken to Sheridan as a demo tree. Then we decided that rather than drive the 7 plus hours home that we would just drive the three hours to Edmonton to visit my parents overnight. So today, after a stop at Lee Valley tools for a new wood carving disc, we finally made the last leg home.
Now, to get back to "normal" - whatever that is...
PS. Specs on the tree at Caledon:
8" wide Wade tree,
16" seat length (9 3/8" thigh length)
4 x 90 with a 7 1/2" gullet height (6 3/8" hand hole height)
3" high x 4" cap horn at 27 degrees
4 x 12 cantle at 37.5 degrees with 1 1/4" dish.
