Riding around on a horse for a limited time

I'm baffled about how to go about doing this, but I'm sure it won't be a problem for some of you experienced folk. My main problem is that I don't really know how the timer works. Anyway, I want to let the user ride a horse for five minutes, which prevents enemy encounters. I've already done the sprite work, and I can figure out how to prevent the enemy encounters, but I'm not sure how to let the user ride around for five minutes. Help?

You can set the timer to start running and then use a parallel process event with a conditional branch that checks the timer. So basically "If timer = 0 stop riding horse, else (leave blank)."

**Edit** Ninja'd

There is a game Timer you can use.  Set it to 5 minutes, and then you can have a Parallel Process which checks the Timer to see if it has reached 0.  Make sure the Parallel Process does a "Wait 60" after the check, otherwise it will hog the CPU. 

If the Timer has reached 0, after being started, you can remove the horse.

And if the player gets off the horse, disable the Timer and stop the Parallel Process (i.e. set a Switch that turns it on to OFF)

I got it worked out, thanks to your posts. When the player rents the horse, it starts a hidden timer that counts down. I did a common event with a conditional branch to check the timer and turn off the switch, just like you guys said, and it works! =D