Sing: Goin' on a trail ride!

That's right, folks. Izzy and I are going on a trail ride tomorrow with Irie the fearless halfie and his mom. I'm psyched. We haven't been since last summer and it will be good for both of us. The barn we board at is totally land locked on five very flat acres, so any opportunity to get out is fabulous. Then factor in that we live in Idaho with lots of mountains and it's a fabulous hill workout.

Ahem. So today we did several awesome things. First off, our new dressage bridle came. It's a lovely black bridle with white padding and no flash (and it was an amazing steal off ebay!). Best of all, I have pictures again today!!


Despite our fabulous new bridle, the jumps were set up and I really wanted to go over them, especially since Cathy gave us the all-clear to be jumping little stuff on our own. I love my rubber reins on my other fabulous bridle, so we switched the bit back and went for a ride. Izzy was wonderful!! (I'm running out of superlatives today.) We put the scary fake bush from our scary stuff session yesterday under one of the crossrails and I put a rail over the terrifying planks.

The scary plank jump in all it's glory. We are no longer intimidated.

Izzy jumped them all like a super star. I need to work on keeping her straight before and after the jumps and staying back with her... We had one hairy moment where I jumped ahead of her. She still went (over the plank, no less), but I nearly came off the front. Poor mare. I stayed back much better after that.
Izzy's cute face.

Then I talked Irie's mom into riding Cassie. I promised her that I would only take pictures of Cassie (Izzy's actual horse mother) and not of her, so please ignore the person. ;-)
The ol' lady's still got it. What a lovely girl she is!!
And...
Yeah. Not the best form picture ever, but not bad for the rider's first time on Cassie ever and the rider's first time intentionally cantering a jump ever. We'll work on it.

PS Does anyone know if there's a way to rotate pictures?