What is Road's End Farm?
Road's End Farm is a small all-girls horsemanship camp in New Hampshire.
It is far more than just that, however. The farm is a working farm camp, and the duties of clearing the trails, maintaining the fields, tidying up, performing daily chores, and most importantly caring for the horses, all fall to campers during the summer season. Work duty is mandatory (skipping it is frowned upon and will probably get you a long, stern lecture) and all campers must keep their dormitories tidy lest they earn the dreaded Dirty Detail-- tasks such as scrubbing trash bins or cleaning vans or shoveling muck only given to those who truly live like slobs.
Not to say that it's an unpleasant experience. Just the opposite, in fact. In addition to the chores, there are over 70 horses there to love, and hardly anything keeping a camper from seeing them any time they wish. Campers are assigned a horse and a partner at the beginning of each week session and are then responsible for the care and feeding of that horse.
The sight of a sea of horses being fed out on the main lawn, just far apart so they don't fight, is amazing and seen every morning and evening. The sight of the same sea of horses being tacked up on the lawn is reminiscent of an amazon cavalry unit.
Aside from the nessasary scheduling for riding periods, work details, meals, and swimming lessons, campers are free to roam and romp where they please on the huge premesis.
Dormitories are organized by age, with the youngest girls in Dormitory Three up to the oldest girls who live in the Cape Cod house on the other side of the lawn. Strong friendships are often forged by the dormmates, renewed every year if the campers return.
All that is just the technical aspect of it, though. Plenty of silliness happens there, too. It's full of kids, and horses are as entertaining as they can be frustrating at times ( I can never get Almonzo to pick up his hooves for me so I can clean them... :( ) even if some of the weirder things they decide to do remain a mystery to even Tom and Alicia, the full-time headpersons in charge of the whole fantastic operation.
No matter how much insight to the world's workings the great and wise Tom Woodman may impart to the campers ( and he does so at great length after almost every supper) some core mysteries of the universe still remain. Why don't horses drink water when they look awful? Why do teenage girls even bother dressing up to go to a movie theatre on a thursday night when no one else will be there anyway? How many cobs of corn can a 21-year old counselor consume, and is that quantity more than the amount of grilled cheese a 10-year-old camper can eat at a single sitting? Are there really aliens out there, and do they really fly around in transparent living-room-looking spaceship things?
I've attended for nine years and I honestly still don't know. Which is why drawing cartoons about it sounded fair game to me. (Tom is really sure about the whole aliens in flying living rooms thing and I've never heard him lie before so I'll take his word for it.)
You can find the summer camp official website here.
Road's End Farm is a small all-girls horsemanship camp in New Hampshire.
It is far more than just that, however. The farm is a working farm camp, and the duties of clearing the trails, maintaining the fields, tidying up, performing daily chores, and most importantly caring for the horses, all fall to campers during the summer season. Work duty is mandatory (skipping it is frowned upon and will probably get you a long, stern lecture) and all campers must keep their dormitories tidy lest they earn the dreaded Dirty Detail-- tasks such as scrubbing trash bins or cleaning vans or shoveling muck only given to those who truly live like slobs.
Not to say that it's an unpleasant experience. Just the opposite, in fact. In addition to the chores, there are over 70 horses there to love, and hardly anything keeping a camper from seeing them any time they wish. Campers are assigned a horse and a partner at the beginning of each week session and are then responsible for the care and feeding of that horse.
The sight of a sea of horses being fed out on the main lawn, just far apart so they don't fight, is amazing and seen every morning and evening. The sight of the same sea of horses being tacked up on the lawn is reminiscent of an amazon cavalry unit.
Aside from the nessasary scheduling for riding periods, work details, meals, and swimming lessons, campers are free to roam and romp where they please on the huge premesis.
Dormitories are organized by age, with the youngest girls in Dormitory Three up to the oldest girls who live in the Cape Cod house on the other side of the lawn. Strong friendships are often forged by the dormmates, renewed every year if the campers return.
All that is just the technical aspect of it, though. Plenty of silliness happens there, too. It's full of kids, and horses are as entertaining as they can be frustrating at times ( I can never get Almonzo to pick up his hooves for me so I can clean them... :( ) even if some of the weirder things they decide to do remain a mystery to even Tom and Alicia, the full-time headpersons in charge of the whole fantastic operation.
No matter how much insight to the world's workings the great and wise Tom Woodman may impart to the campers ( and he does so at great length after almost every supper) some core mysteries of the universe still remain. Why don't horses drink water when they look awful? Why do teenage girls even bother dressing up to go to a movie theatre on a thursday night when no one else will be there anyway? How many cobs of corn can a 21-year old counselor consume, and is that quantity more than the amount of grilled cheese a 10-year-old camper can eat at a single sitting? Are there really aliens out there, and do they really fly around in transparent living-room-looking spaceship things?
I've attended for nine years and I honestly still don't know. Which is why drawing cartoons about it sounded fair game to me. (Tom is really sure about the whole aliens in flying living rooms thing and I've never heard him lie before so I'll take his word for it.)
You can find the summer camp official website here.