Out on the Trails Again

Sunday morning I hitched up the trailer, loaded TC up, and headed out to a local event facility for TC and my second trail ride of the year! Nicole was going to come with me, but she actually got to go cross country schooling at the same facility at the same time, which is way more fun than walking slowly around on the trails with me. Plus like, neither of us want Murray and TC to necessarily be friends, they have an eerily similar buck. We won't let them exchange phone numbers.

Trails!

TC unloaded quietly and seemed interested in where we were. He wiggled around a lot while tied, but no pawing or rearing at the trailer. I tacked him up, grabbed my clicker, and hopped on to wander around. I don't know the facility very well, but Nicole had pointed me in the direction of a trail, so off we went.

There is a trail that goes around the outside of the cross country course, and TC, still adjusting to what it meant to be at this facility, saw all the horses out on cross country galloping and it seemed to go through his face that "oh, this is a place to go VERY FAST" and was totally on board with that. So I got off and we did a bit of ground work.

I found a short loop that walked around a pasture and only had one side of it on the cross country course. Then there was another loop that walked around the stadium arena on the other side of the property. So we figure-8-ed that a bunch until he settled and realized what the point of this was. Not going fast. We were there to trail ride.

There are horses here!

TC settled in really well, he wasn't too spooky (he found two scary things to look at) and only whinnied a few times when we got out of sight of other horses. By the end of all of our wanderings, he had returned to his low headed, very slow walk and was just casually looking around.

As we made a loop around toward the cross country course, I saw that a lot of the galloping had finished and decided to go out toward Nicole and her barnmate. Unfortunately they were done so I didn't get to see Nicole and Murray go, but I walked out to them and TC was very good about sniffing Murray quietly while Nicole's barnmate went cantering by on her young horse who had decided that she didn't want to leave the course.

Erm. I may or may not have thought that from afar that horse was Murray. Like I've seen some quality screen shots and gifs of Murray pulling that exact stunt. Still I felt bad as I realized the rider waving at me on the quiet horse was more likely to be Nicole. But hey I mean Nicole told me earlier that she may or may not have wanted TC to roll with me in the water complex. We're even.

Such a cool place

All in all, it was a GREAT day! Another new facility (that's three brand new facilities in the last month) checked off. Plus, it was some of the first hills that TC has climbed in a long time. They were rolling and not steep at all, but I'm glad that we were able to do some mild climbing.

Hopefully we'll be able to trail ride there again and explore a little bit more. I'd love to get him out into the water and trotting around on the paths, but maybe we'll have to do that on a Monday when no one is out there so that we don't accidentally join a cross country lesson.

I was super proud of TC being able to be so chill there. He hated the HPW (where we did these shows) so much even after being there several times, and this place has a very HPW-feel to it. Loving my seven year old so much this year!