The Maryland Horse Trials

LISTEN. When you take two kids and their ponies plus two horses for M and the total twelve ride times are within a four hour window, things are gonna get hectic.

The short version is: everyone did well (except M's son, whose pony dumped him on XC because the kid hadn't put enough leg on, but still, bad pony). One of the kids won her division and I was proud of her because I was coaching her and she clearly takes riding very seriously.

The horse trials was at Loch Moy, a very nice facility in Maryland. It was unrated but you'd never know it: everything was very nice quality and they had about 500 horses there. I wasn't in love with the stadium course design for the elementary level, but all of our three elementary horses jumped around fine. The elementary xc course was great, and the novice course (which M rode one horse in) was nice but had a modern, technical feel to it.

At one point when M and I were walking her novice course, she turned to me and said, "I just really love eventing." Which is good, because this is how she makes her living, but I'm not sure I do. We shall see. I'm not opposed to trying Lex out in the lower levels and seeing what happens, but the part that was the most fun for me to watch and the part that looked most inviting was still the jumping.

Anyway, I'm a tired puppy today after running around like mad yesterday, but I'd really recommend taking horses to this horse trials if you're in the area. It was beautiful.

Anyone in this area going to Sandstone in a couple weeks? That might be Lex's showing debut in whatever is the lowest-level they have in the combined test.