Wave Wednesday

It's been a while (a really, really long while), but a full update will be coming soon! More importantly - I finally got to go for a beach ride! It's been almost five years since my last ride. 

Jetta's been to the beach a total of about 5 times, but I was still not sure if she'd remember the beach and be ok with everything. It ended up being the perfect day and both horses were great! Such a perfect way to celebrate finishing up vet school with a fellow student <3

 

Bay mares rock!

Pictures of me taking pictures of my horse lol - equitation be damned!

My fav picture

This was going to be semi-"wordless Wednesday" but this is too funny of a story. We crested the dunes to the beach access point and there was a horde of children on an apparent school field trip. They were all screaming and running around and throwing pieces of driftwood - the horses were TERRIFIED. We finally convinced them to walk through the group since they left us no option other than to go directly through the children, and as soon as the kids all saw us they started singing "Old Town Road" at the top of their lungs. What a weird experience...

Beachin'

Love living close enough to the beach that we can head over for the day to ride!

PM, the one who has taken 99% of my awesome eventing photos, said that her repayment would be a beach ride on Misty. So of course I had to repay her!

It ended up being a beautiful day at the coast. It was warm without being sweltering like it's been at home. I forgot my sweater but ended up not even missing it!

Most Excellent Day

I had a most excellent day at the beach yesterday!

AC and I packed up the ponies and headed out. The weather was absolutely perfect. Of course, as soon as it's spring break, the weather turns bad (currently pouring down rain outside) so we had to make the most of our last sunny, warm day.

Ready for an adventure

The coast turned out to be sunny but sooo windy. It was crazy. I felt like I was going to get blown off my horse. AC and I just went alone so the horses were both a little calmer than the first time we went, without the really spooky horses there, but Misty was still quite excited.

When we got down on the beach, we let them trot for a bit to get their extra energy out and then settled down to walk and play in the water. And we actually got them in the water! Misty had to take the lead and all she needed (well, after a few times of running away from the waves) was a little tap with the whip and she went right in. What a good pony! We even got to do a full out gallop this time. She was going as fast as her little legs could carry her, but it wasn't all that fast, haha.

Proof that we were, in fact, in the water. And cantering!

Crazy mane

 It was a blast. Misty was so great and I was really happy with her. Afterwards we loaded the horses up in the trailer with their lunch and went to the brewery for our own lunch and drinks. Such a great day!

A Rodeo and The Beach

Such a crazy weekend! Luckily the horses got to fit in there somewhere.

Friday I mentioned that I was finally going to ride the monster pony. She had almost two weeks of lunging in side reins and finally looked sane enough to hop on. I had lunged her fairly hard the day earlier.

Did it help? I have no idea. She was a nutcase.

I don't think she's bucked/reared that much since that one time (almost two years ago?) she decided that she didn't want to be a riding horse any more. 

I'm quite proud for managing to stay on because there were some IMPRESSIVE moves in there. Including, but not limited, to the "drop shoulder and spin the opposite direction", "bronco bucking", "rear so high your rider thinks you're going to fall over backwards", and my favorite "pretending to get ready to rear, then snatching the reins out of your hands to take off across the arena". Fun, right?

Several of these... luckily none that involved me flying off.

I think it was a combo of time off, riding in a dimly lit arena and of course feeding time was happening in the loft. All sorts of scary things were happening during our ride and she just couldn't handle it.

Eventually we got some nice work. As long as she was moving forward in front of my leg and being soft in the bridle I let her trot out as much as she wanted. We didn't canter. Lots of reminding myself to drive her forward into the bridle (no pulling!), lots of 20 m circles getting her to bend and fill that outside rein. Lots of transitions.

We worked so hard last year to get where we were, I just want my nice horse that I had at the end of summer back! I promise I have a nice horse...

Take 2 will happen tomorrow. I will be wearing my sticky breeches this time.

In more uplifting news, I took Misty to the beach. A group of friends was going and invited me. I decided not to take "the crazy one" since I had no desire to be ditched into the ocean, even though Misty has never been to the beach and Jetta's been quite a few times and is quite good there.

It was interesting.... Definitely not the best group to go with for the first time since they were all spooky but one. There's only so many horses that the "good" horse can babysit at one time. There was tons of spooking at everything. Including the worst experience I've ever had with a person on the ground, being a complete jerk about being asked to walk instead of run with his stroller past us. I don't understand why people have to be rude... 

Overall though it was good. No one got bucked off (one horse did roll though but at least it was in the sand and not the water). No one got run away with. It was absolutely gorgeous out. Misty even hopped over some driftwood! Baby xc schooling right there ;) Eventually I hope to actually get her in the water, but at least she went in the little river.

AC, the girl I board with, and I are hopefully going to stick to a plan of going for two trail rides and one beach ride every month. I'm excited! It's awesome to be with someone who is motivated to do the same thing as me. And we both have Thursday's off of class/work so it will be perfect. Once Jetta regains her sanity I want to take her lots of places to start working on our fitness. First LD endurance ride is in May!

Hopefully next time I'll get some "real" photos with my nice camera. AC's horse was so upset when she stopped to take phone pics of me, rearing and spinning so we didn't get that great of pics.

I have no idea what I'm doing in this picture. I look like I can't ride...

Heading back to the trailer.

I just love this one. Gorgeous day and wonderful pony!

New best friends. William and Misty, sitting in a tree...

Cross country log! I wanted it.

At least she crossed the river like it was NBD.

Good to be Home

It's good to be home... I guess. Really, the only good thing about being home is getting to see my horses. Oh, and probably sleeping in my own bed. Otherwise, getting back to real life sucks.

I had a great time in SD. Almost makes me want to move to a beach town. Almost.

Cool display of horse shoes in Oldtown San Diego

Happy panda at the zoo

Potato chip rock - we stood on that little thin rock. One of the craziest hikes ever.

 

Sunset in La Jolla

Beach!

While I really, really want to be riding Jetta right now, she's at least going to get the rest of this month off to finish healing. I think she'll be fine to go back to riding and we can start conditioning for our endurance ride. I am determined to check this goal off of my list! I went and visited her today and she looks really good. Fat and shiny for sure, I had to loosen the bellyband on her fly sheet! Her hematoma is almost completely gone (yes!) and her back legs are looking better, though still a little scabby.

I stuffed her with apples while I was home. I missed her!

In the meantime, I get to focus on Jazz and Misty. The plan for Jazz, as I said in my last post, is to find her a new home. Meanwhile, we're going to start rebuilding her muscles. She actually looks quite good when she's moving, but she's lost a lot of topline and butt muscles and gained some underneck muscles just from not having to work over her back. So that's the main focus. I'll probably use her to teach Misty to pony, go for some trail rides, let friends ride her, etc.

Getting our dressage on. Jazz says that she prefers western now.

Misty is going back to full, ADD style work. We're going to do some jumping, work some cows, fine tune our working ranch horse skills, and continue the dressage training.

Just What I Needed

Just what I needed - a great, distracting weekend to keep my mind occupied!

It's still really rough thinking about Grady. I knew it would be hard having him gone, but it's random things that make me upset, like opening my ebay watch list and finding a blanket I was thinking of getting him, or finding a to do list with "Groom Grady" on it. And the pasture is so empty... I keep expecting him to walk into his stall or whinny at me. I created a page at the top of this blog for him, just in case you're interested. I still have a few pics I want to find and scan to add to that page.

My friend AR and I made plans to go ride at the beach since the weather was supposed to be nice and boy was it gorgeous! It was a lot of fun, I really needed that.

We have a cool shadow :)

Jetta behaved pretty much exactly like I expected her to. Her attitude as we started out was pretty much, "heck no, I didn't sign up for this!". She spooked at everything. She spooked at the grass, she spooked at the puddles, she spooked at the different colored sand, she spooked at the hikers, she spooked at the driftwood, she spooked at the waves. Geez horse. But she's this way in the spring every year since she's shut inside pretty much all winter. And after some impressive maneuvers in wave avoidance (her technique - frog leap the waves so that your legs go in five different directions at once, nearly unseating your rider, or if that isn't satisfactory, spin and bolt), eventually she got over it and we had a really great ride.

Having a good gallop is a cure for everything!