Riding in the Rain... Sun... no Rain, again

Traveler and I definitely need more practice working on our dressage (who doesn't) so every Tuesday I pass the kids off to preschool / daycare for 3 hours and run home, hook up the trailer and drive out to the nearby arena for our lessons. It's an outside arena and this last week it was pouring!!! Traveler was not too happy about that and he makes these funny "grunting" noises when we do dressage, as if he's saying - okay, I'll do it, but I'm not happy about it. He was grunting away at this lesson. In addition to being in the rain, the arena was filled with water - so we practiced 20 meter circles practically under water. Not our best performance. I guess this would count as riding through puddles - we were so wet when we finished! He was never so happy as to be getting in the trailer, going home.

Here we are later on this week - doing a bit of lunging. I lunge Traveler to get his head in the right space and help him transition from thinking happy breeding thoughts to working thoughts. He has to do one nice circle at a walk, trot and canter (with calm transitions from the trot to the canter) and then stop & move off his shoulder in the other direction and complete the other set of 3 circles. And then we ride - this usually helps me to know where he is - and if we are going to have any "fights" we usually get them over with on the ground and then we can get to work.

I had a friend over to help take some pictures for this Mini Contest and she saw the list of things we have to accomplish and wanted to know if I was going to ride Traveler bareback at a trot for 5 minutes. (I am not.) So kudos to all of you who are able to get that task done - it was a huge step for me to move from a western saddle to an English saddle on Traveler. Call me chicken.....

But here we are transitioning from a walk to a canter in less than 2 steps. Traveler can do this really well off my right leg heading counterclockwise, but it takes a little more persuasion for him to listen off my left leg. Moving off my left leg for anything is definitely harder for Traveler and we need to work 3 times as long on the left side than on the right.

Here we are again in the rain (what is up with the weather) and I am picking up Traveler's four feet from one side. I had never done this before and so I wondered what he would do. He didn't seem to mind - he cooperated nicely. He actually doesn't really like to pick up his feet - I have no idea why - so I was pleasantly surprised when he did it so well.

Not much time left to complete our challenges - I'll see what we can get done tomorrow.