Show Time!!

Great day at Frying Pan Farm! Awesome day if you were under the age of 12 since that seemed to be the age cohort taking all the ribbons. I want to see those kiddos ride the same way on Amber. Guaranteed she would not make it easy for them. We saw a couple of incidents where ponies got the better of their riders. In the class prior to mine one kiddo used her crop a time too many and found herself sitting in the dirt with her pony racing around the ring. In a couple of my classes there was a girl riding a horse that was oversized for her and she couldn't seem to keep him in a trot. He would be cantering long after we were asked to walk.

Enough about everyone else. Amber and I did 3 pleasure classes (one division). The first class I totally screwed up. Screwed up as in posted on the wrong diagonal for eight strides. It never fails. I only post on the wrong diagonal in shows. The second class was walk, trot, and "go as you please" meaning the rider has the choice of trotting or cantering. I opted to trot in this class and I thought we did fairly well. At one point we got kind of squeezed and Amber stalled out almost into a walk, but I thought we deserved a ribbon in that class. However due to the subjective nature of pleasure classes, if you don't ribbon in the first class you're pretty much screwed in your whole division. I had some hope for the third class since we hadn't unleashed the stellar canter however Amber was determined to canter on the right lead going both directions so we were out of contention pretty quickly.

Except for a few major mistakes, a good experience overall. I think it may have been the best we've done in a show. The Frying Pan Farm series are Virginia Horse Show Association Shows so they bring out a lot of people going after points not training horses.

Photos: major props to Stephen Reasonover, one of my non-horsey friends who made it out to take photos.