The way to heaven is on horseback

Well today has been a long but eventful day, I have had two really good rides on two fantastic horses. A day full of horses, face planted the floor off a horse and am now aching and ready for bed, but tomorrow I am off to see Jack, then he's home wednesday.  So the first ride of the day was on Vettie, we were working on maintaining consistency in the outline in both walk and trot. It went really well, as long as we kept his pace moving and forward we were fine. Our best work was our trot work, where we maintained a great self carriage. I am so happy with the work that we did. We did lots of walk trot transitions doing just short blasts of trot work. We also did lots of circles but we did a small amount of lateral work at the minute just sticking to doing leg yields.  My second ride of the day was on Tubby (the horse that I am going to part loan) and this is where I face planted the ground. Tubby needs some work with getting on him, he likes to move off. I'd got my foo...

Today has been a good day but a long day at the stables, I got there for 9.30 this morning to help Fiona out and Suzanne came up to help out too. We had all the horses to muck out and the weather was horrible, it was chucking it down. I mucked out Little Rocky, Percy, Gatsby, Soly and Sam's stable. I then put in their stables Gatsby (the trouble maker), Sam, Vettie, Chloe, Fussy, Rosie and then Fiona did the others. We then started debating bedding, for the past few months the stables have had straw pellet bedding in, but it looks dirty all the time. Yes it's easier to muck out but it doesn't look good. Thursday Fiona decided to put in Bliss bedding, this looks amazing, and smells clean and fresh BUT is a nightmare to muck out, it takes forever, it clumps together and you end up taking to much of the bedding out. So we're going back to using Aqua max bedding at the minute. That looks clean and fresh and is easy to muck out but it's expensive!  After I'd f...

Well it's been a long and tiring few days but I have had a good couple of rides too. I rode Gatsby on Sunday and we worked on the Canter. We did this really cool exercise that was really tiring but it was so much fun to do. We warmed up briefly (as Gatsby had already been rode and I was feeling fairly well stretched and warmed up). I got Gatsby working nicely but very very forward in the walk and trot then we moved on to canter the idea was that we did two 20m circles with three poles at three points of the circle. At the fourth point and over 'x' there was a box. The idea was that we would canter over the poles on the 20m circle at 'a' when we got to the box we would come back to trot or walk, and then change the bend picking up the opposite canter lead (because you're going around the circle the opposite way) to go around the circle at 'c'. We were basically doing a canter figure of 8 with a simple change over 'x' building up to doing a flying...