While sitting in class this morning, I received a text message from Lacey saying she wasn't feeling very well and wouldn't be able to make it. She said Wayne could still ride Sissy if he wanted, and so I asked him if he still wanted to go, since I surely did. He agreed, and we stuck with the plan of him picking me up from school at noon, with my riding pants cleverly beneath my scrub pants.
He picked me up just outside the classroom (great service!), and we drove out to the barn. It's been raining for the past week, so everything is a messy, sludgy, muddy mess. I had to trudge through the mud to get Jasper, who was a little hesitant to leave his best friend Shandy. I turned him loose in the arena, since I know the terrain in his pasture doesn't allow him to get up any good speed, and he happily trotted and cantered around while I did some gentle directing from the ground.
We packed up the trailer and loaded Sissy and Jasper, and hit the road. This was our first ride with just the two of us, and we were looking forward to it! When we arrived, my friend PJ was nowhere to be found. I had let him know we were coming, and assumed we'd been there often enough now he didn't feel the need to come out and chat. The ponies were unloaded and tied to the hitching post and tacked up.
In the three times we've gone "out" together, I am always amazed by Jasper's calmness while we're getting ready. When we ride in the arena at the barn, he's buzzing with anticipation, and I have to typically do a few minutes of ground-work to get him to relax and listen. This just isn't the case when we go out, and that makes me so happy.
We headed out with Jasper leading the way. Both horses were feeling good, but both were behaving very well. Once we turned out of the pasture and up onto the trail, we noticed that the trail was very slippery with wet, boggy mud. I had planned to do a little bit more trotting on this ride, but the conditions were not looking good for that.
We ended up taking a different trail than before, but it was a really good one. We turned off our regular logging road onto a softer trail that was much steeper. This is where the footing was good enough to trot, so that's what we did. Jasper lead the way, and wanted to charge charge charge up the hill. He rated very respectfully, and negotiated the trail with ease and professionalism. Wayne and Sissy had to catch up, since she didn't really think trotting up the hill was a good idea. After the big up-and-up, we turned back onto logging roads and then onto what appeared to be a four-wheeler "fun" track with lumps and bumps all the way down the hill. Due to the recent rain, the poorly constructed dirt jumps had become thick mud bogs that we had to slog through. Jasper doesn't much care for the slippery mud, and he had slipped a couple of times earlier on the trail trying to make it to better footing, so this made me fairly nervous. At this point, a group of pheasants burst out of the bushes to our left causing the only spook I've experienced on Jasper. It was very small, but with the potential of more pheasants and the terrible footing, I opted to dismount and walk until we got onto more solid ground. Jasper seemed thankful and pluckily followed me down to better footing, where I remounted.
On this ride, I wanted to see if Jasper's "jigginess" on the homestretch was due to barn sourness or just the feeling of being left behind, as he tends to be very careful and pick his way down the slippery hill back to PJ's. I had Wayne wait with Sissy so we could take the lead again, and it seemed to remedy the problem. He's learning to handle himself better on this trail, which I think also contributed.
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