Rainbow in the Morning

This morning I caught a rainbow in the distance while Raven was eating breakfast.  Really beautiful view!

 

Field Trip to Sue's House

Today we packed up Dewey and Daisy and headed over to Sue's place to ride with Amy and Zora.  Kimberly Hale Photography was also there to document the morning.  I was due for an easy couple rides, which is why I chose those two horses.  While we were there I also hopped on Zora who is recovering from an altercation with her paddock gate (baby horses - ugh) to see how she was moving.  

When we got there, first to go ride was Dewey.  Since it was purely a fun experience field trip I rode him a little in their outdoor arena, then their indoor arena, and then went for a walk in their back pasture to cool out.

We did have a little kerfuffle at the start of our canter.  Dewey immediately started shaking his head left to right vehemently swinging his ears from side to side.  I stopped him and scratched each of his ears since it seemed like his ears were bothering him.  We picked up the canter again, and he started it again.  I finally realized the string of beads in his browband had jumped out of the channel, and was smooshing his ears!  The beads unclip out of the leather browband, so I just removed them completely and put them in my pocket.  Instant fix, problem solved!  Thank goodness Dewey always tells me.  If you zoom in on this above photo, you can see the beads lying across his ears.  No wonder he was shaking his head!
 

Next we headed over to their indoor arena and worked a little in there.

After I finished with Dewey I hopped on Zora briefly.  The reason this photo is black and white is because we had ALL the colors and styles going on.  My shirt is bright yellow, the pad was green, red, and teal, the bridle was western and brown, my boots and the saddle were english and black.  Truly a Wenglish ride!

I had a chuckle as I edited the photos when I realized I'm so tall, and Amy's so short, that with me on Daisy the pony and Amy on Zora her draft cross - we end up nearly the same height anyway!

As we were warming up unfortunately Zora's roommates went for a mad dash around their front pasture.  Daisy didn't care, but Zora did a little spook and darted forwards.  Amy has a really solid balanced seat from all her many years in the saddle and rode it just fine.  Zora's draft brain then kicked in and she decided it wasn't that big a deal and immediately went back to walking along sedately.

Once we'd hacked around in the arena a bit we went out to the back fields for a little mock trail ride.  I love the photos, it's such fun to have pictures of riding with friends.

 

Lastly I took Daisy over a couple barrels in the arena.  We've been schooling lead changes over fences at home and I wanted her to have the same experience in a new place.

 

A super fun morning - thank you to Kimberly Hale Photography for the incredible images!

Capturing Images of Ranger and Scoot

This is Ranger, formerly known as Buddy.  He was bred by a friend of mine, and went to live at Sue's place about two years ago.  He's doing incredibly well and Kimberly Hale Photography took some cute shots of him to share! 

 

The headshots came out nicely, too!

Scoot is their other gelding, who has been with them for ages and is now 19.  He's a sweetheart and had gone to the Estes Park shows with us years ago, and is now mostly retired.

Three Bay Thoroughbreds Walk Into a Bar...

I feel like this post is a cliche' joke waiting to happen.  

Three bay thoroughbreds walk into a bar, or rather into their large paddock.  They run around together first thing in the morning, Highboy levitates.  

 

They all race to the far end where Highboy slides to a stop, Raven does airs above ground, and Dewey falls down.  I love Dewey, but he's not the same caliber of athlete that the others are...  Dewey was fine, got up and continued playing, but this is a quintessential glimpse of the three horses.

In order to avoid Dewey as he is getting up, Raven proceeds to do some serious mid air ninja-like maneuvers to avoid hitting him.

There were more airs above ground performed by Raven:

 

Some fancy prancing performed by Highboy:

And some stunning pairs work from the two of them as Dewey looked on majestically.

 

And what set of morning shenanigans would be complete without Highboy showing off his favorite cutting horse impression?

 

In case you'd like to see all this performance in action, give it a watch here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfx4nxjcyMA