Rachel and Grandma and Arabian Horses at the Summer Show Part 2

The first post of the Rachel and Grandma and an Arabian Horse series was posted several months ago and documents Rachel's journey on her way to her dream of competing one day at the Arabian and Half Arabian US National Championship Show.

While we were waiting to get onto the fairgrounds, I sent Rachel off to find out where we were stabled. When we did finally get the signal to pull onto the facility we had an idea where we needed to be going.

Once we finally did get our horse trailer onto the grounds, we began the process of setting up the stalls for the horses, moving in all of our equipment and getting our tack room all set up.

Next it was time to school the Arabian horses. Hope was shown as a yearling in the Sweepstakes halter class. That was her one any only time away from home so she needed to be walked around the arena a couple of times to refresh her memory. We decided we would do that later in the day.

In the meantime Dandy needed to be clipped, bathed and schooled. I decided that schooling should come first and had Rachel check the arena to see how busy it was. Dandy hates traffic and sometimes that arena can be a zoo.

Rachel came back saying there was only light traffic so I had her get him tacked up and ready to ride. I wanted her to be able to ride her circles in the corners if she needed to and that would definitely be better with fewer horses in the arena.

As usual, I schooled the horse first. He was a bit stiff the one direction and still wanting to brace a little bit at the lope. With it being only a dozen or so days since I'd started working him again, this was reasonable.

I schooled him through as much as I thought he could handle with the usual flexing and bending including some figure eights, side passes, turns on the forehand and turns on the haunches. Then I turned him over to Rachel.

She started off working on lateral movement, moving the horse off of her leg to the outside. The horse was awesome. He rounded up and rolled over looking like a million bucks! Next, I asked her to lope the Arabian horse and he was as brilliant at that as he had been at the jog.

It was pretty darn cool to see Rachel actually getting as much collection from the horse as Grandma can do and on a loose rein no less. I had her stop him and cool him out, not wanting to tire him out. It was going to be a long weekend for this Arabian horse. There was no way he was going to be able to keep up that quality of work. The horse just didn't have the condition for it but it was obvious he was going to give us everything he had.

To be continued..............

Part 3


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