So on Mackinac Island, there are these carriages that you can rent. And you can drive your own carriage. It’s pretty cool. So we’ve never done it before because it’s kind of expensive, but since Mackinac Island was our big family vacation this year, my parents were like, “Let’s go all out. We’ll do pretty much anything you guys want.” And we’re like, “Let’s rent the carriage.” So we go to rent the carriage and we have this horse named Jim. And he seems like a pretty good horse. They told us that he was supposed to be the calmest once since my dad had never driven a carriage before, and they showed us the route that we were supposed to take.
So we’re driving around in the carriage, and it’s pretty fun. It’s not something that we get to do a whole bunch. And then we get back by the cemetery in the woods where there’s a whole bunch of carriage traffic, and it’s kind of by that butterfly garden. And Jim the horse decides that he does not want to go left. So there are two paths at this intersection. You can go straight, or you can turn left. And they told us, “Oh, make sure you go left ’cause if you go straight, there’s not supposed to be any carriage traffic outside of the Grand Hotel people on that trail.”
So we turned. Jim looks like he’s going left, and he veers off down the path straight. So my dad goes “Whoa, Jim!” because that’s what you’re supposed to do to stop it. And Jim stops for a second. He looks back over his well, it’s not really his shoulder, but like what would be his shoulder if horses had shoulders. He looked at us, and then he just keeps going, and my dad goes “Whoa, Jim!” and Jim doesn’t stop. He does a u-turn! And the number one rule for this was no u-turns and after we did that u-turn, I could see why because the carriage almost flipped upside down during the u-turn, which by the way, was not even on the road, it was in the middle of the woods.
And then my brother because he’s eight and he’s scared, jumps off the carriage, and we think he’s gonna get run over by Jim who is like sprinting through the woods. My mom couldn’t get cell reception. So I had to call the people at the carriage company, who had to come out and save us. So they told us, “Hey, if you wanna keep going, you can.” And my dad and brother are like, “No! Why on Earth would we keep going? Jim tried to kill us.”
And I don’t think Jim was trying to kill us, like let’s be real, I think Jim is a good, good horse. He just got scared of something, or maybe my dad was a bad, bad driver, I don’t really know. But anyways, we ended up walking all the way back to the stable to get our money back. And when we got there, the guy was like “What? Jim did this? Jim was such a good horse all season.” And there we go, we see Jim walking back with the guy. And he’s like, he looks like he’s smirking. It was really scary in the moment, but now it’s definitely funny.