adventureful weekend

I had a weekend filled with the most awesome pony adventures!  Full recaps to come later in the week, but suffice to say that I am planning to eke out a little sleep in on Monday morning (till a luscious 7 am, ha!).

We started with a dressage outing that can be described as nothing less than “epic”.

good pony gets all the sweet nothing whispers

For real, we knocked so many accomplishments off the list on Saturday: got in the trailer, went to a place, kept our heads, did the dancing queen thing with zero (ZERO!!!!) theatrics, got recognized for the fucking superstars we are. Even better, we got good feedback from the judge (verbal and written), and a flow chart in the comments.

we knocked out a 65% at T3 and 67.7% at 1-1

Truly, the best part is that I went into the ring with a game plan, actually rode (instead of just kinda steering and sitting like a passenger), and Murray took my suggestions and responded in a way that I could manage and work with, instead of with interpretive dance.  If we can pull that off this week at Camelot, it will be money in the bank.

On Sunday I took a ridiculously large number of selfies with strangers’ horses.  And by “strangers” I mean Olivia, David, and Kate.  Olivia arranged a really fun wine tasting trail ride for us out of her barn to honor the visit of Jen, and it was so insanely fun!  Literally every horse on the planet Earth is better at selfies than my horse is, so I am obligated to take them with any that I can get my hands on.

Olivia even let me ride THE MULE!!  Literally the first thing I did after I got on was take a between the ears pic, but I later got much better ones on the beautiful, winding, and sometimes terrifying trail that is, evidently, a part of Olivia’s and David’s daily riding routine.  I had played around in my head with the idea of bringing Murray down for a future trail ride, but I honestly have no idea what he would do with a trail that is only 4 feet wide in places with a fairly steep, hilly drop off on one side and the correspondingly steep hill going up on the other.  At least there would be plenty of grass for him to eat while he walked (which Nilla is a professional at)?

The two of us have a fairly light week of riding planned before we go to Camelot on Thursday (with potentially more blogger meetups!!).  I’ll squeeze in a jump lesson and a dressage ride, and hope not to break any of our newfound talent in the process.  And there is potentially RAIN in the forecast for dressage day?  Inconceivable!