Cob Jockey

I had flown in to Houston on Tuesday, spent two days with my childhood best friend, then took the bus to Austin on Thursday.  Rural Texas looks very much like my backyard growing up, with lots of cattle, cattleguards, and oil pumpers.

This is actually a picture of my backyard growing up.

After watching Paddington bring no game to his lesson on Thursday (actually it was very valuable for me to see, because my own pulling breed pony often brings no game to his lessons, and I got some ideas for dealing with it from Jen's awesome trainer) and getting to ride Brego in an arena during the lesson as well:

Detailed recap on serious Brego riding coming soon.  He taught me a lot.

I spent most of Friday with Lauren and Genny, and got to ride Simon!


He is awesome, you guys.  I loved riding him.  He was forward, and happy, but I never felt unsafe, and he clearly knows his job and does it well.  Lauren has really done a great job with him.

Then Genny and I switched horses and I got to ride former big eq horse Mia:

You see me rollin'?  Literally, those stirrups are rolled twice!

She was a blast!   It was so different riding Connor and riding her, I may as well have been on different planets.  I don't ride horses very often, and especially not big strided big eq horses, so that was fun and different.  I took a picture of her neck just because I was amazed at how long it was (proportional, I'm just used to looking at much shorter necks):


I apologize in advance for all of the clashing red in this picture.  I think Jen about lost it when I showed this to her (she sadly had to work while we played with Simon and Mia):


After that it was time to thaw out and meet everyone else!  More to come.

Simon selfie with Genny!