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.

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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.