From Green, to Under Saddle, to Schooling Level, to college...

Welcome to my blog. If you're here to learn something about riding, Dressage, showing, or anything else horse related, its best you move on now. This blog is going to ramble about all those things, but mostly about my experiences of getting back to riding, picking up a new discipline, learning to show (or test as they call it in Dressage), and talking my sweet hubby into providing me with a dream my dad only let me have a taste of in my teens (ownership).

I started riding at the age of 8. At age 8, my family was transferred from the East Coast out to the West. This horse crazy girl packed up the Breyers, ready to move to the house which happened to be "right next door to a little girl with a pony". My dad couldn't have picked a better location. The girl with the pony became my best friend (Jen), teaching me to ride on her little Welsh Mountain Pony, Emma. We rode that pony non-stop. It became our race horse, our show horse, our Indian war horse - very patient pony. As we got older, so did Jen's Arab/ Quarter horse filly, Velvet. Jen learned to start her under saddle, and turn a green horse into a...well, a green horse. But we did have fun with her!

Around the age of 13, I finally got some lessons. An old barn with older horses gave affordable lessons about 2 miles from my home. I was thrilled! After a year of lessons, dad half leased me a horse. I had my own horse! A small black Morgan named Misty. And we learned hunt seat together.

I started schooling shows around that time, dad walking with me as we crossed the road from our small barn to the large Equestrian Show Barn where the shows were held. And dad stood in the pouring rain of the Pacific Northwest holding my horse, as I watched each class from the heated room off of the indoor (thanks, Dad.)

As my skills increased, so did the need for more serious schooling, and better horses...and Dad coughed up the money for me to cross that street and take lessons at the "Show Barn." But I had to say goodbye to my lease, knowing that the new lessons absorbed all the cash for any lease option. But I was going to the premier barn, with premier horses...oh, and premier riders with the money and attitudes to ride what they wanted. Which after a year or so, became the reason my riding came to it's end. More about that another time...

So I left the barn, and riding, and my dream of ownership and headed to college...but not before I witnessed a new discipline I'd never considered...Dressage.