It gets hard to write about rides when they all seem the same. I enjoy riding and I like to try new things out on the trail to make things different for me and my horse. So today was one of those days of trying different things. Next weekend we are going camping so I wanted to try bells on Zoe. Sometimes at camping I like to have them on to "scare" the wildlife away. I also use them sometimes at home for the same reason....however Zoe is more used to the wildlife at home (except for mountain lions). I did it last summer and it was no big deal so I put my bells on again. They are jingle bells, large ones, like you see at Christmas time. Zoe didn't mind the bells and neither did Sky or Skippy. We all went off on a ride. I put the bells on my saddle bag. They slightly jingled at a walk, more at a faster walk, and made more noise at a trot. It was interesting at a trot...the sound was a consistent cadence-only changed by a slight trip or jumping over a ditch or log. We did manage to scare a young buck.
The other different thing as a new cell phone holder. The zipper on my old one broke. I couldn't find another case like it so I settled for something different. I wasn't sure about this one, it has velcro holding the flap over the phone. I was concerned that as I would go thru the brush, the flap would open. But that did not happen today...but it is still a concern for me. Maybe I could add some more velcro to it. I also need to fix the part that wraps around my leg...just some extra sewing should do it.
The last thing that was different was a different way to play "popcorn" or "leap frog". Usually we are riding in a single file line-at a walk or a trot- and the last horse comes up the side at a faster pace and takes the lead. It's a good exercise on passing horses, having your horse get passed up, and going from back to lead and also practice traveling in the middle. What was different today was how we changed places. I read about it last night and it was sooooo simple I wondered why we hadn't tried it before. It starts out the same-single file line, at a walk or a trot....but now the lead horse circles to the back of the line to take the last place. Now the 2nd horse finds itself in the lead. It helps everyone if the lead horserider calls out "changing places" or "circling back". It was interesting because it seemed at first like the lead horse was just going off in a different direction...away from everyone else....would that horse come back or just keep going off? And the second horse wanted to follow the first horse, but no...it had to keep going straight. It was different....works on different ideas that the horses might have. After a while they all got used to it. But at first keeping the second horse going straight was a challenge, having the lead horse go in a different direction was a challenge....and you could tell that they thought we were playing the game all wrong. Crazy humans.
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