The Morgan Show...........Move in Day

By Wednesday morning things were moving along at the Morgan show. Rigs began arriving as early as 8 and I think many of the horses were moved in before the show office officially opened at noon.

The various volunteers and some paid employees of the show began arriving as well. The ribbon ladies were there in the early morning to set up the ribbons and various trophies. The paddock manager arrived to do sound checks and the ring announcer checked in to make sure everything she needed was in place.

It was beginning to look like this crew really did know what they were doing without much guidance from me. The Arabian horse shows could learn a lesson from the well oiled machine of the Morgan horse show.

The biggest job for me on that first day was overseeing the delivery of first bedding. Those first deliveries of bagged shavings were large enough I could get them delivered by the fairgrounds maintenance crew. The guys just dropped the pallets piled 28 high with 80 pound bundles of shavings right in front of the appropriate stalls. Once the first bedding was delivered, the exhibitors would have to come retrieve the bags themselves......or that's how it was supposed to go.

On this move in day the arena was open for schooling until sometime around 5. That's when the crew would come to put up the dressage arena. Once that was accomplished the arena would be closed to schooling for the night. The exhibitors were used to this schedule so most got their work done in plenty of time.

One thing I noted as the first horses began to school, these Morgan horses seemed to be hot things. After all the years of hearing about how "hot" Arabians are, I was surprised to see these particular Morgan horses were actually hotter than the Arabians that I am used to seeing at horse shows.

It wasn't long into this early schooling when I saw the first loose horse of the weekend along with a rider dusting off the dirt. Thankfully both horse and rider were fine although it took a while to catch the horse and even longer for it to settle enough for the rider to remount. I must admit I'm glad it wasn't me needing to climb back aboard that squirrely thing.

As 5 o'clock neared, I cleared the arena. Then I had the maintenance man set the platforms in place for the judge's stand at the far end of the arena. Once that was done, I had the arena drug before the dressage ring was assembled.

Since there was a complete crew to do that, it was off to dinner for me and the show secretary. Did I happen to mention that the show secretary and I hit it off? I think we'll be long time friends whether we work on future horse shows together or not. This was definitely a perk I hadn't expected when I'd signed on for this project.

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

Dressage Day
Visit Blog Village and vote daily for this blog Here They are now measuring the rankings by votes out, so if you find my blog on the site, please click that link too to improve my rankings. TY