The weather for Sunday was mighty sketchy, and the facility is at the end of a very long gravel, then sand road. The organizers were kind enough to move the event to Saturday, so I drove down on Friday and spent the night. Saturday morning after we cleaned paddocks and fed the horses I walked the course with the dogs.
There were cute carrots in the trees to direct us.
I then schooled both horses individually on the course. It was a blast. Both horses enjoyed it and it was a great confidence booster!
Because of the costume contests for the poker ride in the morning I decided to bedeck myself in my favorite helmet cover. I found it in Snowbird, UT on a family vacation and it's actually a cover for a snowboarding helmet. I love it though, and it's the Bit of Honey colors. It's situated in such a way that I can't also attach the gopro to my helmet, so I don't have videos from the rides. But it was worth it for all the laughs and "what kind of reception do you get with that?" comments I received.
I'm super eager to go back to this location with a group of riders and their horses, because this is an IDEAL course to introduce both humans and horses to cross country jumping. They have a plethora of small fences, and a winding course that goes in and out of the woods and through shade as well as water and sunny fields. There are a couple beginner novice fences too, so it kept my horses interested and trying. They have cabins we can rent, and we can make a full weekend clinic of it!
Since this weekend was their Halloween Hootenanny they had decorated things in all kinds of ways. There were giant spider webs in the trees,
wooden plaques shaped like tombstones with humorous inscriptions
and a log in the water with a fake alligator crawling on it! I didn't actually get a photo of that because I was wrangling the dogs through the water while walking the course. When riding it, my horses didn't notice that there was something on the log, they seemed to assume that it was merely an oddly shaped log.
One of my favorite moments was watching Pascal try to scale what to him was an extremely large log. He'd watched Rizzo hop over all the other fences prior, because she's essentially a pogo stick in dog form. Pascal really wants to do whatever Rizzo does, and so he put forth his best effort. I try to keep this kind of thing to a minimum because he's so young, and just like with young horses I don't want to push my young dog too hard too fast either. However, as long as he's doing it himself and not getting upset I feel like it's ok for him to do this stuff at his own pace. I would never push him to run farther than he can go, and he definitely gets plenty of nap time in between adventures. However, having a border collie puppy again is great fun, especially watching him enjoy learning his job.
He first inspected the obstacle:
Then he asked if this was really surmountable:
He believed me and Rizzo when we said he could do it - so he gave it the true border collie try!
And did clear it
Successfully dismounting on the other side.
Now I'm tired! Didn't I do that well, Kim?
It was so fun to have a camping weekend with my dogs and horses and we can't wait to go back!
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