ponycamp, day 1

Or night one, as it were. Left for Columbia around 5:30, assuming we might be a couple of minutes late for our 6pm lesson. Instead we got pretty stupidly lost (and got really bad directions from the 15 year old working the desk), and ended up getting there around 6:45. Grr. So, they had to give our horses away, but had some more for us to ride at 8. The plan was an hour or so lecture and an hour of riding, so it all worked out okay in that respect. Sue, our lovely teacher for the day, said we were going to do a mini-lecture on grooming and tacking. Sigh. I can groom and tack in my sleep, but we knew we had to start somewhere, and that they were mostly trying to gauge our experience, so we curried and brushed and picked hooves, and saddled and bridled and martingaled, and all was fine. We chatted with Sue as we tacked, talking more about our riding experiences, that we rode all through growing up, that I jumped 3'6 courses and showed intercollegiately, that greensock taught at a bunch of summer camps and had done quite a bit of dressage. After grooming and tacking, we ended up just hanging out at the benches outside the barn, watching lessons (they have at least 3 outdoor and 2 indoor arenas) and talking, a lot more like three people who rode than one teacher and two students, so that was nice.

Got our horses to the large indoor arena at 8 - I rode Morgan, who was probably 15.1 hands, Quarter Horsey, chestnut, and greensock had Moon, a little, chubby Appaloosa mare. Both were bombproof sorts of school horses who spent most of the lesson testing us and seeing what they could get away with, which is always fun, especially when you know how to make them behave but don't have the muscles to do it any more. In any case, we did some stretching, walk, trot, canter and transitions, and called it good. Sue said that we must've been taught well, and she knew a lot of people who said they had been riding for a long time and had any number of bad position problems, and that we had a solid base and everything would come back to us with the muscles. Hoorah - we proved that we really do more or less know what we're doing.

We got home in 25 minutes. Much more reasonable.

We go back today at 2, which is in the middle of the day and therefore will be less heavy with traffic, hopefully. We'll take interstates rather than side roads, and hopefully we'll get there some semblance of on time. My legs hurt less than I thought they would - the only things that are tender and my butt bones, where you make contact with the saddle. We'll see how that changes tomorrow.