Tails From Provence

Pas de Deux

“I’m looking forward to getting the two of them into the arena to play with this stuff again – I’m wondering just how much I could do with him from the back of another horse… “

I said that just eleven days ago, when I blogged about ponying Aero from Flurry.

Today I went into the arena to find out.

I did a little prep work before mounting. I asked the two of them to reverse and return to me. We did a little bit of following work, with both horses following me reasonably well at liberty. Then I stood beside Flurry and did some lateral work with Aero, asking him to move sideways and then to move hind hindquarters, away from me and towards me.

Then I mounted and started asking Aero to repeat the same movements, only this time I was sitting on Flurry. Aero cottoned on straight away. His reverse/return was not bad, just the return was not always straight back to me. I asked him to move sideways just for a couple of steps at a time and he did it really well. That’s something we can easily build on. Moving his hindquarters worked well, too. We also did a couple of tours around the arena with turns and circles, in walk and trot. Aero was excellent, keeping his head more or less level with my knee most of the time, without me having to pull or tug on the rope. Finally, I attempted to get Aero circling around Flurry in walk. That didn’t work too well. You’ll see on the video. Any tips are more than welcome if you’ve done this sort of thing.

While Aero was a star, Flurry was… well he was very funny, actually! First of all, when I started asking Aero to reverse, using the word “Back”, Flurry started to back up, too. The same with the sideways stuff – I’d say “Over” and Flurry would start to move to the side until I stopped him. When he realised that I wasn’t speaking to him, he started tuning me out completely; ignoring both my voice and my aids while riding him. He was lazy, his steering was only so-so and his halts were crap – right back to six months ago when I invariably ended up hauling on his mouth to stop him. So Flurry is having an intensive flatwork session all by himself tomorrow. After all, we have a dressage competition in just over three weeks time – it’s time to get him back in shape again.

After running through the exercises I had wanted to try, I turned on my video camera and messed around for another while. I’ve edited the video down to five minutes, so you won’t get bored! The funniest thing, for me, is Flurry’s reaction when I’m asking Aero to leg yield near the end and Aero has to think about it for a while. Flurry is all but jumping up and down, waving his hand and shouting “I know! I know! Ask me!”

When I got home, I told the LSH what I had done with The Boys. If I had two Aeros, I said, I’d be unbelievably brilliant at this stuff! But I’m blessed with a keen-to-please, super-intelligent Aero and my lazy, slow-thinking Flurry.

I wouldn’t change them for the world.

Tags: equitation éthologique, natural horsemanship

An App for bringing back memories

(This is NOT a sponsored post!)

I’m an iPhone person – I’ve had an iPhone pretty much since they were first available in Ireland. I’ve loved my iPhone since the day I took it out of its attractive, well designed packaging and turned it on – it looks good (so sleek and shiny!), it feels good (so silky smooth!) and, most importantly, it WORKS good (so useful!).

I’m not a big App user, though. The most frequently used Apps on my iPhone are Scrabble, Google Maps and the weather App provided by France Meteo. Although I’m a big Facebook user, I actually HATED the Facebook App and removed it after a couple of months – I prefer to view Facebook via Safari. Yes, I know it gives me a Mobile version of the site, but it’s still better than the App.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, a Facebook friend shared a post via something called Timehop. What’s that, I wondered. I visited their website and I thought it looked pretty neat, so I installed it. You give it access to your social media accounts and to your photo storage sites and, every day, it presents you with something you did or posted on that day, one, two, three or more years ago. A blast from the past, so to speak.

For example, one of the posts it pulled out of Facebook for today was this :

It seems I have Flurry a little over four years now!

You can choose whether or not to share what Timehop gives you, via your choice of social media sites. So I installed it and I am enjoying the memories it brings up.

But this week it excelled itself. It pulled up a blog post I had shared on Facebook a year ago, along with this picture.

Which was a nice surprise, because this week is the first anniversary of the death of the bearded gentleman in the foreground, my friend and sidekick for many years, Denis. And that photo was taken the very last time that the Three Amigos all rode together – Denis, my friend and fellow Wanderly Wagon Anne, and myself. And it also turned out to be the very last time that I ever rode with Denis. Only none of us realised just how significant it was at the time.

So when I saw that photo, I went looking for the blog post that I was pretty sure I had written about that particular ride. It’s on my old (old) blog, thewanderlywagons.com, which followed the adventures of Anne and I as we undertook a 500km trek across France.

If you click on the photo above, it’ll take you through to that particular post, “A Typical Irish Weekend, Continued.” I’d love if you clicked through and read the post. It won’t take long and there are some pretty pictures. Take a moment and join me in remembering Denis today, one year after he left us.

And thanks, Timehop, for reminding me of this post.

Tags: timehop app

Flurry has Fun!

The LSH hadn’t ridden for roughly six months, for no reason other than that he was busy; I had other companions to ride with; I was doing a lot of ground work so I was trekking less; we all got a bit lazy in the summer etc etc etc… On Sunday, after our late night as Cinema hosts, we were rudely awakened at 7am with the merry sound of gunfire ricocheting around the valley. Oh hooray. It’s hunting season again.

The LSH was less than impressed, seeing as he had a slightly fuzzy head after the night before and there was no way that falling asleep again was an option. Hunters are allowed to start at 7am and they were taking advantage of every minute of daylight at their disposal. Seeing as we were awake, we decided we might as well get up and have a cup of tea to get us going and, an hour later, the LSH was feeling human again so we went off to the farm to go for a short hack.

The first and last days of hunting season are the most popular and we could see cars and jeeps parked all along the woods as we drove up the hill. We decided it would be most sensible to stick to the major trails in the woods and to head south east – there are three new hides in the woods on the other side of the farm and Georges advised us to avoid them.

So off we went. Me leading the way on handsome, confident Aero.

The LSH and Flurry followed along behind :

This was the first time I’d ridden Aero in a bridle for ages. To be honest, I was sorely tempted to ride him in the rope halter – I’m feeling that confident with him these days. But wisdom/caution reigned supreme and I stuck to the bridle. He didn’t seem to mind too much!

After half an hour or so, Aero felt he’d been on point duty long enough and he allowed Flurry to pass him. I took advantage of the opportunity to snap a few ‘bare hooves in action on stony ground’ shots. He’s 100% sound on this horrible gravelly road now. It’s great to see. Aero still wears Renegade boots on his front feet. He’s such a softy. I think he needs the extra protection that they give him.

(Must trim Flurry’s hinds this week – I’ve just done his fronts)

We met some hunters on the road and stopped for a chat with one of them. He knew me to see, I think I’ve passed by his house on one horse or another a few times. He hadn’t had any luck but he said one of their group had shot a sanglier (wild boar). He and the others he was with seemed to be giving up. I guess it was time to head to the bar!

I noticed some really good blackberries just beside the farm so I went and picked them after we turned the horses out. Blackberries here tend to be much smaller, much less juicy but much sweeter than Irish ones. This year has been unusually wet so they are bigger than normal – almost as big as at home! I picked enough to add to my breakfast yoghurt for the next two mornings. They were a yummy change from the strawberries that our garden is still producing.

The following morning, I rode Flurry in the arena. The weather had changed, with rain forecast for most of the day, so I decided to just do a quick flatwork session with his bridle (as opposed to bitless). Nini and Alexandrine were in the arena as well and they put up a small jump after a while. Poor Flurry was dying to jump it. Really. Any time I rode past it, he leaned in towards the jump, hoping I would ask him to do it. I was sorely tempted and I came to the conclusion that yes, I probably will start doing low jumps with him, just because he loves it so much. But Monday was not the day to start – my back hasn’t been right for a couple of weeks and jumping would definitely have made it worse.

Flurry still had his bit of fun, though. I asked Nini if she’d like to jump him!