Back to Reality

California was amazing--80f and sunny every day. I have oodles of pictures, mostly on my phone. Not going to lie. It is quite hard to come back to real life after perfect weather.

That said, real life is quite a bit less stressful, involves getting more sleep, and has better roads, so there are good things.

I spent an hour in ponyland one day. That was ridiculously adorable. All the little ponies with lovely conformation and movement, toting kids over good sized courses. Oh my! Did I mention how cute those delicate little pony faces are with hunter tack on?

Yeah. Sort of what a hunter pony for no good reason now.

After ponyland, we got to hang out with the CWD saddle reps and try out new tack. Here Stephanie is riding Foster in in CWD dressage saddle and ys, a halter. There is a picture of me doing the same thing. I'll post it when I get it.

I didn't get to sit in the new jumping model, but I will when it shows up. (At least, that's my plan.) I am strategically developing a taste for very expensive saddles.

Despite my best efforts at strategery, neither saddle is in my future. I didn't ask about the dressage saddle, but the jump model for regular peons like myself runs around 7k.

Not ever happening.

I also got to attend my first-ever polo matches. It was an awesome way to end a day. Not only are there fast, pretty horses, but we were drinking wine and enjoying some perfect, bug-free weather.

Plus, I was sitting with a nice gentleman who breeds and trains polo ponies (horses?) and explained the rules of the game to me, which made it way more interesting.

I think my hunter aspirations with Izzy had a lot more to do with that fact that the rails fall down and it looked pretty non-threatening, but if I had any lingering doubts, I snapped this picture next to our trailer. Omg. Talk about detail work.

Every hunter at the show had some variation of this, and while it's lovely, I cannot imagine the amount of work involved. That said, the very small amount of time I got to spend watching the working hunters gallop down the lines to 4' fences was impressive. It may be a long time, but I'll get back to hunterland eventually.

I actually have less pictures than I thought I would. I took a bunch with my phone and kept the world of facebook updated, but the whole grooming thing meant I had very little time, plus I videoed almost every round of our people with Stephanie's phone so we could watch them on the tv each night. All fun, but not great for blog content.

Now that I'm back in the cold north (it snowed yesterday. For serious.), I'm making tentative plans about my riding future. It's frustrating for an overachieving tack whore to sit around and twiddle her thumbs, but nothing is decided yet... hm. Hopefully I'll have news on that front by tomorrow.