The Weekend

Friday evening was pretty warm. We had plans to ride and by the time we got home and all our stuff done it was 6:45pm. When Ranae asked if I wanted to go for a ride I said how about we go for a "sit". Craig Cameron is always saying, "They call it riding, not sittin'", well, sometimes it's just nice to go out without anything in mind but to enjoy the evening. We meandered down the canal and back on a nice 45 min. ride. Someone had abandoned a 3 week old kitten by the canal, so we took it home and gave it a bath, food and water.

Saturday was much cooler and we got to ride around 4 pm. The route we wanted to go took us out through a little arena where the "charros" spend Saturday afternoon doing their cow bulldogging. That's where they ride down a fence line, reach down grab the cow's tail and flip the cow down. Don't see much sport in that, but they find it quite enjoyable and they didn't mind us watching for a bit.

We headed out toward the city farm and got in a couple of good long trots and a number of lopes in using the roads between the crop fields. We rode for a little more than 2 hours. We were getting pretty good at trotting side-by-side, but when we wanted to lope it turned into a race. We still need more work at that.

Sunday morning we set up the cones and rails. We essentially had three stations and Susan joined us as we practiced things from the clinic. We set up a set of cones Craig Cameron likes to set up and you do a circle around then you go in one set, through the middle and turn the other way going out. We did it at a trot, then we did it at a lope. It really helps get the steering working well. I was incorporating the hand and leg positions Matt taught us and Jessie did very well. We dropped to a trot to change leads. Here's a crude drawing of how we set up the cones:


We also worked on side-passing and backing up. I put my spurs on for this session and Jessie was more responsive. After about an hour it was time to put the horses up and head out to spend the afternoon with my oldest brother and my Dad. It was a fun weekend.