Unwanted Company - But a Learning Experience

I was able to sneak in an evening ride last night. Ranae plays tennis so it was going to be just Jessie and me. There are a lot of Mexicans in our neighborhood. I like Mexicans. I speak a little Spanish. They have improved our neighborhood in some ways.

As I'm riding out, off in the distance I see a guy and a horse about 1/4 mile behind us. I'm working on transitions of canter and trot, he's walking, I figure I'll stay ahead of him. 10 minutes later, I look back and see him galloping down the canal bank. His horse is on the muscle. Jessie is listening to me, but also checking back to see if this horse is coming.

At a little crossroads, I decide to stop and see which way it goes. Of course, he sees me stopped and thinks I'm waiting for him. Great! His horse is in a bosal and for the next 35 minutes I never see slack in the reins. Jessie stays relatively calm. I knew I wasn't going to get to do what we wanted so I headed for home. He followed.

He thought his english was pretty good. It WAS better than my Spanish, but every time he said something I had to say,"What?" We walked the 3/4 mi. back to my street. I got to hear all about his job and I think a bunch of other stuff. The guy could talk.

He would occasionally spin his horse around. I'm not sure if that was for control or to show off. I worked on moving Jessie back and forth across the road two-tracking style. And, as luck would have it, his horse was walking so fast, we got to do walk-trot transitions.

It was a good experience for us to meet up and ride with a strange horse like that. I wasn't quite sure how Jessie would handle it. She was calm, but alert. Once we got back to our house we did work on bending and side-passing, so we were able to get a little work done.

Thursday is likely to be our best shot a full-moon ride. We'll give it a shot and hope that Ceasar and his horse Bruno don't show up.