Field trip!

The barn I'm boarding at has no arena so one of the girls and I decided to take the horses on a field trip and go to one of the local, public use arenas and work horses. Originally I was going to take both of mine and she was going to take two as well. There was supposed to be another girl with her two horses going along. Things slowly got whittled down to me and the one other girl, one horse each.

She left one horse home because she's had issues with him and wants to resolve them doing something else before getting hurt. I decided not to take the pony because he's been hauled, shown and knows the drill. My mare has been hauled to a few different arenas to work, when we lived in hellizona and she didn't handle it well. She didn't handle the move well either and is finally learning to cope and deal with things. I wanted to focus on her, so leaving the pony at home was the best option.

Her horse is for sale and she was hoping to get some photos of him in action. Apparently he has also never been in a 2 horse straight load trailer. Well it didn't take long to get him in and we were on the road.

We had a good time. My horse was a little wound up when we got there, as I expected. I got her legs wrapped, saddled up and lunged her a bit before deciding to get on. On the lunge line, she didn't exactly go around in nice round circles, but she did go around. She looked at everything, but she never spooked or got stupid so I put her bridle on, dropped my stirrups and climbed on.



Although she looked around a lot at first, she kept her head together and settled right down to work. We had a really good ride. I got some of our best canter work to date and she was light in the bridle, loose and felt really good. We had some incredible trot work and a few lovely canter departures in each direction. Then my friend set up some barrels to try her horse on the pattern. He did pretty good and I thought WTH? Why not give it a whirl? So we did.

I trotted her up to the first barrel on the right. Going around it she was a little wonky. We trotted to the 2nd barrel and around it a little wide. I pushed her into a lope and we made our way around the 3rd barrel, not so elegantly. My friend was laughing and quite impressed. She thought my mare looked pretty good on barrels. Mind you I was riding her in dressage tack. We did a couple more "runs" and the last time thru, I pushed for a little more, guided my mare around the barrel and let her go a little to bring it home. She enjoyed that.

Barrels are not something I will be trying to compete her with. My mare can run and may possibly be good at it, but this was all in fun. I wouldn't expect my mare at 18 years old to really be competitive in barrels and more importantly I doubt her knee would hold up. I really love this mare, why would I want to set her up for injury or a total fail?

After untacking and giving her a chance to roll- she didn't.



Love that face....