On Friday, Nay Nay and I took our second trip out to Fair Hill. I found last time that if I head out in the late morning, there are a lot of trailers (at least over at Gallaher Rd), but after 1pm? It’s dead quiet. So we went over after 1pm and were the only trailer. Perfect. He needs to learn to adjust to other horses, but we don’t need to do everything in one day.

We hauled over with our saddle on. Not necessarily because I was going to hop on. But, just in case. I wanted to lunge in tack to add that to our repertoire. And see if we were over the whole trying to roll while lunging. We’ll see. Results are positive.

We got off the trailer and without other horses, Nay was significantly more relaxed. We took our time gathering our equipment (no bridle yet) and took a walk up to the ring. He was good. We ran into a cyclist who was VERY nice to ask if he could ride by and once Nay got a good look, he was fine.

Lunging was both better and worse. He was amped so I just went with it. If he wanted to move, move we were going to do. We started to the right and I just let him canter. And canter. And canter. And when he wanted to trot, we cantered a little more. And did a little more to the left. At the canter and the trot. Nay has struggled a lot at the canter so it was nice to have a nice surface just to actually canter. Maybe next time I’ll bring out my longer line and really work on letting him stretch. But this day just cantering was what he needed. Since we cantered a lot, I didn’t want to drill anything else too much so we did some walk-trot-halt transitions and decided we were good.

And then I decided what the hell. Let’s see if I can get on this monster. He was quiet. Worst case? I’ll die.

I left a rope halter on under his bridle with an extra lead rope just in case and quickly schooled the mounting block. He had tensed up a bit, but didn’t lose his mind. More cars (no trailers, but cars with bike racks) showed up at this point so I just through caution to the wind and hoped on and stuffed a peppermint in his mouth. At that point, I achieved success.

My goal was to see what I could do. If it was walk to the ring and back? Great. If he panicked? We’d stop and school. But we just walked and stopped. Walked and stopped. He was super tense at first (his neck was very hard), but rather than being fast he was slow. So we just took everything in. The rocky ground kind of helped because I tried to keep him on the gravel so he stayed slow (lol) but eventually he moved himself to the grass. Whenever we stopped, we clicked, treated, and got some rubs, and he started to relax. Once we made it towards the ring, he started to stretch out and the reins got longer and looser.

Eventually we made it past all the arenas and took a look at the woods. He seemed to really like the crunchy leaves (why? No idea), but less the squirrels playing in the woods across from us. Once we turned around and wandered in the small field next to the ring we’ve lunged in and explored the area where the 2 horses jumped out of the woods last week. He very much enjoyed the journey around that area and wandering around the outside of the field.

Then I tossed all caution to the wind and decided why not walk through a tunnel. I mean, it’s scary, echoes, and looks terrifying. If I’m going to die, this will be the death of me.

And Nay just walked through the damn thing. WTF? No cares at all.

We didn’t wander too much on the other side. His timer was starting to go off and I didn’t want to get lost. So we just went back through, walked to the area we explored last week (he really started to say I’m DONE! My dollar is up!), but he was good anyway. And then headed back to the trailer and called it a day.

Did we ride long? No. But we were out at Fair Hill for almost 2 hours in total. And for the first ride? Perfect. Way more than I could have ever expected. Best boy ever.

Following the Fair Hill Adventures (hoping to rinse/repeat this week), I rode at home on Saturday. I debated on and off riding as it was super wet out. In the end, I wanted to take advantage of a tired horse from Friday (haha) and figured I could just walk.

Nay was actually great. Other than some carrot stretches, we didn’t actually do any ground work. I just hopped on and off we went. He was good and the ground was actually drier than I expected. We walked and worked on some different things for a while.

And then I decided to trot.

And all hell broke loose.

Sort of.

Kind of.

Right away the groaning and grunting and tantrums started. Because why not?

Did he do anything? Yes and no. He hopped around a little bit and all that got was more trotting (once we halted and backed up). So we trotted. And trotted. And trotted. And trotted. And ran into a tree. And trotted. And trotted.

He was significantly better whenever we trotted over poles because he had to concentrate to go over the poles, but honestly? I’m 95% sure he was attempting 2 things. 1. Attempting to show his displeasure over being asked to work and 2. Trying to scare me to get out of work. I’m 99% sure he was not trying to unseat me because if he wanted to unseat me, he could have actually put effort into getting me off. He didn’t. But, I suspect it was a scare tactic effort of hopping around in hopes he could stand and do nothing.

To the right? Again, same crap. But, the right is less easy for both of us. Same tactics, less smooth. I obviously need to work to the right. Instead of bend, I feel like we’re making right turns. So progress is needed. Poles again are super helpful. So, it’s a work in progress but much progress is needed.

Hopefully one of these days we’ll get to trot on a flat surface. That would be super nice.

We’ve been chugging along here, but I haven’t had anything interesting to post. So I haven’t. That said, we’ve finally had some adventures so back to blogging.

I’m determined to learn to trail ride. Nay Nay has big (very big) shoes to fill. Batt was the world’s best trail horse. And while I don’t think Nay Nay will ever fill those boots, he can at least aim to fit the role of “safe trail horse” or “fun and safe trail horse” or “we can go on a trail and have fun and go back to the trailer and not die trail horse,” right? Or at least that’s the goal.

But Nay Nay has opinions and I’m determined to work up to trail riding. I’m not taking him out, getting on, and expecting it all to go well. But I want to go work my way up to that so I can achieve success.

On Friday, I headed out to Fair Hill in the morning and bought my annual pass. First level of committing to I WILL LEARN TO TRAIL RIDE DAMNIT! And then hitched up my trailer, loaded up Nay Nay, and headed over to the park.

My goal? Get there, look around, and come home in one piece.

And while I had grandiose visions of riding, realistically, that was never in the cards.

We got there, parked, and Nay was fine until I opened the escape door at the exact moment that a pair of riders headed towards our trailer. Nay saw them and broke the trailer tie… but thankfully he walked out of the trailer like a gentleman. For all the crap he pulls, he respects the step up of my trailer and walks out slowly and respectfully. His eyes were popping out once off the trailer, but his feet were firmly on the ground. And despite the anxiety, he registered the clicker click.

After a moment of breathing, I grabbed my gloves (next time, gloves first, then horse), grabbed my whip, and off we went. We grazed for a while and then took up residence in the dressage warmup ring.

Goal there? Move our feet. We ended up lunging the entire way around the ring. I wish I could have recorded it. He looked fantastic. But we lunged at the trot, moving around as we went. Nay was definitely looky and very concerned about walkers and bicycles. LOL. But we did keep moving. I also forced him to lunge through a big puddle.

After we lunged to the left, I took him to the center to work on some other stuff when we almost died. Yes, death.

You see, we were in the center of the arena when 2 horses exploded out of the wood breathing fire (um, walked out of the wood and stood still). Nay basically started rearing and spinning when he saw them. I yelled my apologies to these ladies who thought I was insane with my crazy horse who I struggled to get under control… Eventually I did and they moved on.

We did lunge to the right, again around the arena, but it was less pretty (we also struggle to the right so we need to work that way). But, we got it done. After we worked on backing and regaining focus.

While we were backing I caught 2 horses walking towards us from the other direction. Not wanted to have another incident or destroy the ring again (I had just managed to stomp all of our foot prints/rear marks), I walked out of the ring and let Nay graze. Unlike the first pair, this pair called out hello to us and started chatting as they approached. Nay looked up, saw them, heard their voices, and let out a deep breath, and started grazing again. They stopped near us, chatted for 5+ minutes, and all was good. I think the calling out was biggest difference. It makes all the difference at home when my husband approaches and calls out. After they left, Nay wanted to follow, but he was happy enough to walk the other direction.

We ended up going on a 15-20 minute walk and explored the park. We chatted with a couple and their dogs and grazed as needed. We did some backs and halts when we needed to engage the brain and made good use of the clicker (carrots were a no, but nilla wafers were a yes). In the end, we headed back to the trailer and he was 1000% more confident than when we first headed out.