Canal Trail

Today Zoe and Skippy went on the canal trail.  My intent was to have Zoe lead to the canal, have Skippy do 1/2 of the canal, then finish with Zoe doing the rest.  But today I kept Zoe in the lead the whole way.  There were times that she was not happy about this.  There were a few scary places, horse eating rocks I guess, that we had to stop and not go forward.  In fact in one place she did the backup, but then she had to go to work sidepassing.  Usually this gets her going forward again....too much work sidepassing the whole trail, forward is much easier.  We have not been down on the canal trail in a while so I expected her to be wary in some spots.  She went past her usual stopping places but found a few new ones.  All in all, the interruptions in our ride were not very long.  I remember in the past that we would be spending quite a few minutes trying to go forward.  Today, each time was not that long.  It only happened 3 times.  It was an improvement over last year and I'm hoping to go on that trail alot more this year before the water gets too high.  It is one of my favorite trails.
Today was such a beautiful day...we met many people on the trail.  We counted 21 other riders.  Only 3 were going in our direction.  We stopped many times to let people pass and in one of the spots we had some excitement.  As we got on the canal trail from the pasture trails there is a spot where the trail dips down and it's usually muddy/watery this time of the year.  It was a nice gushy spot today.  We stopped to let some riders coming towards us pass before we got down to that spot.  Above us there were 3 riders going up and down the gullies.  So one of the horses coming towards us didn't like the watery/gushy place and almost fell down and the rider almost came off.  The horse ran towards us panicky and Zoe started to jig a bit.  I got her calmed down pretty quick and the now muddy horse was rushing by us.   At  the same time that was happening one of the riders on the trail above us fell off, there was yelling.  They caught the horse and I guess the rider was okay...he was up and he had friends with him.   Zoe and Skippy sure got to watch some excitement and they didn't do to bad....they were pretty much controllable.  I'm glad Zoe was listening to me and was able to calm down.  The rest of the riders we met today seemed to have things under control.
All in all I think it was a good ride....Zoe got to work on some leading in uncomfortable places, the horses did good with all the other horses we met-even in excitable situations, and Zoe did what I asked her to do...even if she had to stop and think about it.  7.29 miles, max speed 9.51, avg speed 3.68