Equestrian Team Day 13 - Last Lesson of the 09-10 School Year

What an interesting day.
Best news: Our directions from last week work perfectly!! We even found an alternate this week (a happy mistake) by getting off the highway at the wrong point. Excellent! Definitely emailing those to the team next year. I don't know what route they take, but we know for a fact that this one works and is TomTom GPS approved!
Really though, I don't understand why they didn't have directions for a route that worked on the website.

I got to ride my favorite horse today, Cameo. *love* All I could think of while I was riding her was one word:

GLORIOUS!

A fantastic ride. I love the smoothness of her trot and the quickstep in her canter. I'm in love with that horse. I'm also happy to announce that my jumping courses are getting more complex! Ha, and complex meaning I get to jump two jumps instead of one. Last week I jumped two in a row; this week she had me do a little pattern.
Oh Cameo. Wonderful flat horse, but she loves to test what she can get away with on the course. No problem for me. I've lived through Brie, there was no way I was letting this horse get away with anything.
Yeah okay. She refused the first time I wanted to trot over the tiny X jump. So I already had it in my brain to make her go back and do it again multiple times before Nell told me to do that. She was perfect after that. I, on the other hand, didn't get comfortable jumping over with her until the last one, which felt amazing. Note to self: Don't look at the floor! It throws off your balance as you jump!

So as a "present" to us before we left, Nell let us ride an extra horse. Yay! Until I found out I had to ride Jimmy. Oh Jimmy. Remember when I was learning how to use a crop? I used it with Jimmy because he's so damn slow! I tried to go into this being confidant, talked to him as I tacked up telling him that he was not allowed to pull any crap on me while I was riding my final ride there fore the summer. In response he tried to bite me. No worries. I was determined to make this horse trot without kicking him and by simply pressing my heels into his side.

Well I accomplished that! It kind of went downhill from there. It was drizzling and while Jimmy and Kara's horse were fine, the filly in the pasture was extremely happy and started galloping and bucking around. This excited Jimmy. As we trotted past, he jumped up in the air. In my brain, it looked something like this:
I'm sure it was actually a buck. I wouldn't know: I've never been bucked before. Point is, I didn't fall off and wanted to walk back around to try to tell him that bucking in that corner was not acceptable.

Didn't happen. Instead:
I didn't fall off thought! Yessss.
Yeah. I figured at that point that training this old coot to stop bucking at the sight of a filly bucking was not my problem: I wasn't being hired to train, wasn't concerned with training this horse, and wasn't about to risk paralysis for a 20 minute "treat ride". After all, it was such a longer fall than from a Paso Fino. So I just walked the upper, non-pasture half of the arena while Kara rode her horse around quite pleasantly.

I hope I never have to ride Jimmy again. We don't mesh well and I don't think it's worth it for me to deal with a "difficult horse" when in the long run, if I end up doing anything with horses, it'll be as a Paso trainer who will never have to kick my horse unless I'm asking for a death wish. I know how to handle difficult horses. I just wish that Nell would understand that I'm not a complete horse idiot and when I say I train Pasos, I don't mean I sit on them and listen to a trainer telling me what to do. I train them. Straight up.

Summer's so close, I can taste it. Maybe this summer when I get a job, it will go towards a special "Lexa's future Nissan Altima/Ford F-150" fund. If I save from this summer and next summer, I should be able to buy it by junior year when I live off campus. That way I can drive out and visit Brie, Nina, and Harry whenever I want to!