CHAPTER 1

"Robin, are you absolutely sure?"

This was my husband, asking if I wanted him to come along with me while I schlepped around Guanajuato from one horse farm to another.

If you know Jeet at all, you know what a wrench it must have been for him to ask me that. Because if there's one thing Jeet can live without, it's horse farms. Horse farms and the horses that inhabit them.

"I'm sure," I said, my heart swelling the way your heart will swell when you have a sudden extra-big rush of love for someone.

But then he had to go and spoil it by wagging his finger at me. "Just remember," he warned. "You aren't in America. You have to be careful down here. It isn't–"

"Please, Jeet," I said. "You told me about the Napoleonic Code about thirty-three times already. And I get it. Now relax. I'll be fine." I turned away and rolled my eyes. Honestly. You'd think I was fourteen years old!

"I'm not trying to be a pill," he said. "Mexican prisons are the pits. You could get into one and never get out or–"

"I'm just driving to some horse farms," I interrupted. "It isn't as though I'm going to get involved in some international incident." Jeez.

"Driving is how it happens. You get in an accident and the next thing you know, you're in jail." He moved to the window of our hotel room and looked out into the street. "And I don't know if driving is a great idea," he said. "The streets are pretty darn narrow."

I knew he'd relent on this one: we'd paid a fortune to rent the car. No kidding. It cost more to rent the car than it did to fly here.

We were in San Miguel de Allende. It's this town in the mountains with no stoplights, no parking meters, no neon, no billboards, and ancient cobblestone streets. And all of it on purpose, too. It's a colonial city that the Mexican government wants to keep that way. Quaint, but really quaint, as opposed to fake quaint. Tourist from all over–the U.S., Canada, Europe, even Asia–come here in droves.

I wanted to come the minute Jeet announced that his newspaper–that's the Austin Daily Progress–was sending him here. Jeet's the food critic. And because a lot of Texans travel to San Miguel, the paper wanted to do a piece on the local cuisine.

They weren't paying for me, of course. But Jeet got me sort of a gig so I could come along tax-deductibly. What I was doing, sort of, was writing a story, just like Jeet. Except that, while his was about food, mine was going to be about horses.

Horses are my thing.

When Jeet first suggested that I do this–get an assignment to write a story about horse farms in Central Mexico so I could come along–I scoffed. Who would ever hire me?

He picked up a pile of horse magazines. I subscribed to probably five or six. He opened one of them to the page where the people who work there are listed–the masthead, he called it–pointing to the editor's name. "Here," he said. "Call this person and say, 'I'm going to be in San Miguel de Allende, and I wondered if you'd like a story about…'"

"About what?" I'd asked.

"About whatever you think would be good. Horse farms or famous riders who live in the area. What would you want to read about?"

"There are some famous teachers in San Miguel," I'd said. "Nonie Mulcaster, I think. She used to teach Pony Clubbers up in Canada and even made an Olympic rider or two. And there's some guy who wrote a famous equitation book."

So I'd called around and asked some people who'd been to San Miguel and eventually I got the name of the guy who wrote the book. Hans Bell.

I also got a list of some farms. You know, places where there are shows or people can board their horses or take lessons or whatever. Manuel–an old man who works for Suzie Ballinger–told me about a farm called Milagro (That's "miracle" to you gringos.). He'd never been there, but he'd heard about it from bunches of people who'd come up from Mexico, he'd said.

So, armed with all this information, I did what Jeet suggested, called the editor of Horse Play, and guess what? I was now Robin Vaughan, freelance journalist, Brenda Starr and Lois Lane and Oriana Fallaci all rolled into one. I still get the giggles whenever I think about it: Me, actually working.

Oh, please, don't write me nasty letters. I know women work. It's just that I never have, unless you count the couple of weeks I tried to hustle makeup door to door. There just isn't anything out there for a slightly overweight phys ed major, you know what I mean? Plus our little Primrose Farm would absolutely fall apart if it weren't for me and my trusty hammer, wrench, and post-hole digger.

Copyright © 2002 by Carolyn Banks