A couple of years ago I saw someone post a picture or check in to The Retirement Home for Horses on Facebook or Instagram and I was immediately jealous. I googled the place, book marked their website, and pretty much immediately forgot about it. Recently I started thinking about this place again, but because it's two and a half hours away from home and only open 11-3 on Saturdays I was having a hard time making this outing work.
When we go to the farm we were shocked at how big it was. I mean we printed off the map and saw all of the pastures, but apparently when I read that it was over 300 acres I still figured they'd have like maybe 50 horses.This place was AMAZING. In case you missed the stats in the bottom right corner of the picture above, they have 135 horses, 1 miniature donkey, 1 mule, 1 dog, and 1 cat.
Admission is 2 carrots, but for your own good bring like 5 lbs per person. We brought a dinky little 2 or 3 lb bag and what a couple of dopes we were. We ran out of carrots like half way through the journey and then as we saw the horses near the end we were like "Hi horsey, sorry we don't have snacks, will you still be our friend? Pretty please can we pet you? Selfie?" And they would all come over and let us pet them for like 25 seconds until they realized out carrot bag was empty and then they went back to whatever they were doing before.
All of the horses were so sweet. They took the snacks so gently and let us pet them for a while as long as we had carrots still. They would sometimes nose us a little for more carrot bites but thankfully neither of us lost an arm. And just to be clear we weren't worried about that.
Hi cutie!
The property is amazingly beautiful. It has a little hill to it, so many trees, and so much pasture for the horses.
The trail had shady chunk with lots of trees and Christopher was super excited to find a sugar gum ball while we walked through "the forest".
Going in for the pet.
I was trying to take a picture with this horse and it was like "HI! I'm ready for my close up!"
This horse is like, "human, get your mane in check".
One horse was eating something and dropped part of it in my shoe. It was gross.
This one reminds me of a unicorn. I was waiting for the horn to appear.
Then toward the end, my wildest dreams came true. We met Lil Sebastian's cousins! They told us they'd say hi for us.
I made this picture bigger because check out that mouth on Nibbler (miniature horse on the right). lol
It was just so beautiful. I can't even say it enough.
Oh yano, just hanging out with a horse. Normal Saturday stuff here.
DONKEEYYYY!
If you live in Florida or are planning to visit Florida, I highly recommend visiting The Mill Creek Farm Retirement Home for Horses in Alachua.
You can find them here:
Mill Creek Farm Website
Retirement Home for Horses Facebook
