Wonderful Weekend

Ahh, such a nice long weekend. Unfortunately it's now back to the real world.

I had some really good rides on the girls. Especially on Saturday the sun was out and it wasn't that cold. Actually it was almost 60 degrees. Too hot out for blankets! The girls got to go naked for the afternoon.

Saturday when I went to grab Jetta to ride, I whistled for the horses and Misty came trotting up. But no Jetta. I heard Jetta whinny and could see her standing mostly out of view behind an apple tree between the fence and the ditch. Uh oh. When Jetta doesn't come but whinnies instead, that means she's stuck. Envisioning her with her leg through the fence or some other awful scenario, Misty and I jogged down to see what was up.

I got down there and found Jetta standing there. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary. I thought maybe she had her blanket caught in the fence so I walked over and checked. Nope, not even touching the fence. Hm. Then it hit me and I started laughing. My supposed "trail" and "event" horse thought she was stuck between the fence and the ditch and couldn't get out. Keep in mind that the ditch is maybe two feet wide and a foot deep. It's not that hard to walk through it. I made her back up several steps so that maybe she could get to a shallower area of the ditch (couldn't go forward cause the tree was in the way) but she took about 4 steps and decided that was as far as she could go. So, I put her halter on and tried to lead her over the ditch. Couldn't do it. It took a good minute or two to convince her that she could move. She backed herself all the way into the fence with her feet bunched together and did a giant leap... over the tiny little ditch. Sigh. Sometimes I wonder about this horse.

Stuck horse is stuck

Searching for a way out over the tiny ditch...

Preparing to leap...

And we have liftoff! The ditch is seriously so small.

Anyways, after that we had a really nice ride. Well, mostly. It was gorgeous out. I'm still not allowed to ride in my neighbor's arena and haven't asked about the one across the street. And the trails are too slick, so... road ride!

I haven't ridden on the road in forever. I used to ride Jazz and Grady all the time on the road when I was younger. I used to teach all my project horses to ride on the road by ponying them with one of the unflappable horses, which I did with Jetta as well. We haven't ridden on the road in a long time, but she was completely fine with everything.

So beautiful.

Well, except for sheep. According to her, those are fluffy little monsters that can levitate outside of the confines of their pasture and devour full grown horses 10 times their size. But hey, spooking (and tantrums) are awesome for channeling into working on half steps.

Another scary thing. Yellow lines. Those must be treated carefully. You can only cross them straight across (therefore you can't leg yield over them) and you have to give them a hard stare and tiptoe across. But hey, they're useful for helping prevent drifting while practicing our shoulder-in.

Those scary yellow lines.

We live on a nice, relatively quiet road so it was possible to play around with leg yields and shoulder ins. We did a little bit of trotting, but mostly she was too tense and wanting to rush, though we did get some nice trotting in down a short stretch.

Trying to get a nice confo pic after our ride = fail. Jetta's head looks ginormous. She stands all pretty and as soon as I pull out my phone to take a picture she tries to come investigate.

Overall, it was an awesome ride in the sunshine. Aaaand now it's back to being cold and rainy and cloudy. Yuck.