Saturday, July 5, 2008

Summer is Here Again

June has been a pretty sucky month for riding, with me getting a cold and all and the shoer taking his time getting out to replace Max's VERY worn out shoes. However, with June behind us now, the shoer having finally making a belated appearance on the 4th of July and me feeling much better, it's time to get back into the swing of things.

Today, Max and I went on a nice three-hour trail ride to the Ponds. We deliberately chose our trail so we were in the shade most of the way and we got started about 10 am. My trail companion was riding Blue, one of the most lazy but loveable lunk of a horse- for a Standardbred who used to race, he has got to be be one of the slowest and most lazy horses! :-)

The ride was relxing and for the most part without incident. The only glitch is when we took one trail accross a creek with dubious footing- a few logs and the like. Blue went through with no problem but Max had some serious doubts. I even got off and tried to led Max accross by hand but he wasn't having any of it. I finally decided that it wouldn't be a good idea to push things and work on it another day. Everytime I get into a hurry, some sort of disaster occurs and it's understandable from Max's point of view why the crossing looked bad. It would have been a different matter if there wasn't the tangle of logs and vegetation. As things turn out, it was the wrong trail anyway, so my companion had to backtrack.

We even did some trotting although I had to be careful to duck low-lying branches and the like. Max was game and he didn't want to ge left behind. Eventually, we wound up at the Pond. At the Pond, we came accross someone with a 6-month old Standard Poodle- he was a sweet dog but Max was dubious of the whole thing- after the dog incident where my wife got dumped off Max because someone released a dog that got right under him (and naturally spooked him). Since then, Max is a bit skeptical of all dogs. Fortunately, nothing bad happened and it helped that my companion's dog came along with us for the ride (he's a real mellow terrier mix)- after awhile, Max got used to his running around.

I'm not sure what Max made of the deep water at the Pond- we wern't too adventurous but Max seemed to be a bit suspicious of everything for a bit. It might have been the dog, who knows.

We then backtracked the way we came and eventually made our way back home. Overall, it was a nice way to get back into things with all the heat and such.

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