During Hurricane Milton many Sunlake Students had many different ways to prepare and clean up after the storm. For Sophomore Lara Stearns, all eyes were on her horse Journey. She says, “We stayed at our house but evacuated my horse to the World Equestrian Center (WEC) in Ocala because it is a very safe spot.” Lara talks about how the original plan was to keep her horse back at the barn because WEC had stalls taken quickly. She describes, “We got a call in the middle of the night saying they had a few stalls open, so we raced up there to secure a spot for her in a safer environment!” 

  Lara explained how it took 4 hours to get back home due to the hurricane aftermath. She says, “We saw a ton of flooding and had to reroute many times to get my horse home from Ocala.” Not only that but they had to make huge cleanup efforts back at the barn because of Milton. She commented, “My barn lost power, and we had no running water so we had huge containers of water to fill up buckets in horse stalls since their automatic waters couldn’t run.” 

  Despite all the damage, Lara had to start preparing for a horse show coming up. She exclaims, “The first ride back was good as we were preparing for a show the next weekend. Some horses were more energetic than others due to the weather and loud noises the hurricane brought.” Lara was mainly just ready to have things go back to normal and her horse Journey felt the same way. 

 “Journey was very good as she was most likely just happy to be back home!”