May Weekends are the Best Weekends

What.

A.

Weekend.

It started out innocuously enough. My BO and I hauled to the hills to go for a trail ride Saturday morning. Courage is great at trail rides. I mean, yeah, his only bad day last year was trying to get to the ride itself, but we worked on that over the winter and he should be fine.

Or you know, not.

Y U SO HARD?

In order to access hundreds of acres of trails, we have to go through this gate. The green panels are padlocked and the barbed wire fence is well maintained.

The horses just have to walk up and step over the low spot on the little brown metal gate. Until Courage, I'd never had a horse have a problem with it. In fact, the first time C-rage went out there, he stepped over with no hesitation.

Now you can make all the arguments you want about how it looks spooky or is uninviting to horses or is scary or/or dangerous, but the fact is that if we want to trail ride at this location, we have to be able to deal with it.

Let's just say that didn't go well.

Rocking the out of control mane!

Forty-five minutes later, some nice man sent us down the road towards another barbed wire gate that was unlocked so we could move on. Courage proceeded to be foot perfect for the ride.

His only hairy moment was cresting a ridge and seeing three horses standing together.

Courage: OMG ALERT ALERT!!! GIANT THREE HEADED HORSE EATING MONSTER SPOTTED!! SUGGEST POSE DRAMATICALLY AND SNORT.

Me: It's horses with people having a little snack break.

Courage: Oh. Ok.

So despite the beginning, we had a lovely ride on the trails and both came home better than when we left.

The crew! Photo by HorselessinHalifax

Sunday was show practice day! Alyssa went and entered in an event derby, then promptly started pressuring Linds and I to do the same. We set up a time to practice dressage and jumping and hauling out (well, for everyone but Courage, but he hauls fine *knock on wood, fingers crossed*).

Alyssa brought the gorgeous Bacon, Lins brought everyone's favorite supermodel Diva, my awesome fellow boarder rode her 26 year old arab, and of course Courage was decked out.

Practicing my hunter duck. Photo by HorselessinHalifax

We all warmed up together in the arena, then worked on our individual dressage tests. Courage and I did much better than we have been lately, which still isn't fabulous. Ms Bacon was freaking phenomenal. She is going to beat us soooo bad at the show. Motivation to practice harder? Maybe.

Then we set a little course of crossrails, including one out in the pasture. That created a tiny natural "bank" between the arena and the field, so it was actually pretty legit event derby practice.

But he still looked awesome. Photo by HorselessinHalifax

Of course, I didn't think about how I had left his proposed galloping bit on the bridle. It's just a single jointed three ring with the reins on the big ring, so it shouldn't be _that_ severe, but he was NOT IMPRESSED. He did the first jump quite nicely. I took a slight feel of his mouth for one stride to half halt and there was head flinging and running sideways and dare I say we flailed a little? Not pretty.

We finished up our course, but it wasn't nearly as smooth and polished as I would expect out of him with his beloved Sprenger in.

Giant bit does not impede napping. Photo by HorselessinHalifax

But hey. We got around, everyone had a good time, and my (real) mom came out and brought everybody lunch. I think all weekends should be like this.

We're looking forward to a lesson (fingers crossed) today. Rest assured, C-rage will be in his micklem and sprenger and I will try to round up a photographer!