Hobby Horse Blog Hop

Dreaming, over at Living a Dream, has started a new blog hop for use horse lovers to reach out and meet each other.  It's called the Hobby Horse Blog Hop and each week she'll be posting prompts for us to write about.  Since Estes is gone for the winter, my blog fodder is running thin, so this will be good for me keep in the blogging groove.

This week's prompts included the questions:

1. Tell us about your first horse, real or imagined.
2. What lesson(s) did you learn from a horse?
3. What riding discipline intrigues you the most?

Estes is my first real horse.  I love her almost as much as I love my husband, which is one of the reasons I married him.  If I couldn't find anyone to love more than I loved my horse, I would have stuck with my horse.  Estes was a fire-breathing dragon that I fell absolutely, head-over-heels in love with back in 2004.  She became mine in 2009.

Photo courtesy: Rachel at Once Upon a Miracle

I did have a plastic Breyer horse when I was younger that did lots and lots of laps around the make-shift barrels in my bedroom and I had a favorite tree limb at our cabin that was just the right size for a five year-old's pretend horse.  I put many miles on the branch that stuck out horizontally from the tree and then arced upward like a horse's neck.  The Bionic Cowgirl knew that I'd either be riding my tree horse or flying my invisible helicopter when we were at the cabin.  Luckily, they were right next to each other.  In fact, I used the seat of my helicopter (a rock at just the right height) to mount my trusty steed.

As far as lessons learned from horses, there are too many to list.  I don't even know where to begin.  Every encounter with a horse is a learning opportunity and I've been lucky in that most of my lessons have been positive.

I know very little about the different disciplines and have even less desire to compete in any of them. Does that make me a snob? Or a reverse snob?  I'm a trail rider through-and-through.  Not a competitive trail rider, not an endurance rider.  Simply a let's-get-on-our-horse-and-go-explore kind of trail rider.  Estes is game for anything, so we're a good fit.


My question:  Where is your favorite place to ride? Or where do you think would be your favorite place to ride?

Horse Fix

Oh boy, did I need some equine therapy.  But with my equine at fat pastu
re, that left me with my choice of Ranger, Washoe, or Jesse.  That's a no-brainer.  Ranger's my boy.  Washoe and Jesse are a little hard to handle when they've been cooped up and Ranger's just getting too old to care what the young whippersnappers are up to.

From inside the lodge, I could hear Ranger..."Beel!  Beel!  Let GunDiva come play with me!"

What?  You didn't hear it?

I did.  Loud and clear, so I grabbed his halter and played catch with him until he literally sighed and touched me on the shoulder with his nose so I could catch him.  I'm not as good at "catching" with the rope as Beel is.

But I didn't plan on how I was going to get him out of the pen.  In the summer, we just walk them through the square pen, which forms kind of an airlock, and out.  But with the recent snow, that wasn't going to happen.  I walked him over to the real gate and we went out that way.  I really wished that I had been able to mount up from inside the pen, because I was in snow to my knees. (No comments on how two inches of snow would be up to my knees either - it was legitimately deep.)

Ranger and I made it to where I thought I could mount up with a little help from Beel...

This seemed like a good idea.
It wasn't.
I pulled a muscle in my arse.

This was a much better idea.

"GunDiva?  Are you sure this is okay?  Beel's still back there."
Yes, Ranger, it's fine.  Beel's okay by himself.

"Beel!  Stop doing the flashy-box thing!"

"That's it!  You flashy-box thingied my one too many times!"

Five minutes of riding and I feel so much better.  Ranger, eh, who knows.  But at least Beel stopped with the flashy-box thingy.