Ready to Roam

I love Sunday; it's the only day of the week I'm not slammed with responsibilities! I chose to spend pretty much my entire Sunday messing with Amicus. We went our first trail ride late this morning, then we did some ground work this afternoon and this evening.

Chap and I had talked about doing a trail ride all week together with our 'stangs, but our schedules just didn't align until this morning. Before hitting the trail, we went through the paces in the arena to loosen-up the boys. After the friskiness was knocked off our horses, we opened the gate and headed for the hills! Boy were they excited! Our goal for the day was to introduce them to as many obstacles as we could possibly find. We rode them up our 1/4 mile driveway so they could watch the cars go by. Keep in mind that when you live as far out as we do, you just may be waiting a while! We got pretty lucky; not only did we get a hand-full of vehicles, but some of them were pretty loud and shiny. The boys must have gotten pretty desensitized to cars on the 10 plus hour drive from Cross Plains, because they barely batted an eye! Really the only thing we saw that was even remotely of interest to them was a big, blue piece of plastic laying on the shoulder of the road. Aside from that, they pretty much would look, sniff, and move forward. Good guys! HOOAH (Chap's mustang) acted like he had been a trail horse his entire life! Amicus did really well also, but he certainly acts his three years! He'll definitely be a horse that likes to take off and run through an open field. I can't wait!

After we got the boys safely back to the barn, we gave them baths, groomed them from head to hoof, then turned them out to graze for a little while.

A couple hours later, I grabbed Amicus out of the pasture for our second educational lesson for the day. This time, we worked solely on ground work- leading, trotting, sending, backing, etc. As an added bonus, I worked on leading him places he normally wouldn't find himself, like the deck off the front of our barn! He climbed the steps and everything...not even slightly hesitant! Can't wait to see what we'll accomplish this week :)