Photo by Margaret Chant and edited by Jessica Metropulos

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Life's a Dance...

Especially when you're riding Crest out for the first time all year :)

I had a VERY successful horsey afternoon with my kids. First of all, I did a practice-film of my L3/4 online audition. It was really good quality as far as play went, but the footing was so terrible that I could hardly ask her to canter, and thus could not submit it for L3/4 had I wanted to. But that's okay with me for now. The intention was not to ace it, but to get a feel for what needed doing, and how I might go about it when the footing was good. And honestly, I LOVED it. I was disappointed when my camera-person called the 8 minute warning ("I HAVE SO MUCH MORE TO SHOW!" was my thought)and I feel really confident in filming when the ground hardens (a week or two, yay) So I'm really glad I got that taken care of :)

After that, I went out on a really lovely ride with Micky and our mutual friend Sarah. Sarah took Prin, who was a gem, Micky rode Amigo (she's decided to do this more often, we could tell he missed being out), and I took Crest, which brings me to my title line. Today was our first "real" ride out this year, and Crest was...well...a total LBE-on-adrenaline dancing queen. I had saddled him up in the fluidity (MAN I MISSED MY SADDLE!) and had a new bit I wanted to try with him. He was fantastic, behavior wise, but totally high on life and thus very hard to ride because of his perpetual bounce tendencies, that were magnified by 10. The result? A passaging, dressaging, haunches-inning Warmblood-wanna-be who had ALL the moves.

I kept track, and Crest performed like 4 grand-prix level dressage maneuvers when asked, simply because it involved being fancy. I got like 150 yards of lovely passage, a hilarious set of VERY collected tempi-changes, and about 3/4 of a canter pirouette. How funny *eye roll*

So all in all, a very nice ride. Fun was had by all, and I'm really looking forward to progressing with Crest, now that his TRUE athletic ability has been revealed-LOL.

Savvy on, I'm off to bed EARLY tonight :D

1 comment:

sherri said...

I was wondering what you were doing this weekend! It was a messy but fun couple days to play. I don't dare ride until some of the wildness novelty wears off!