Back again

We were in Rome all of last week, so no horses for me - toward the end of the week my horsey withdrawal symptoms were so bad I just HAD to pet a pony, so I went up to say hi to a carriage horse standing in front of the Colloseum, and naturally it tried to bite me - how rude :/

Barokko got lots of hugs and scratches when I got back ;D

During the week one of the other boarders looked after him. She trains with the same trainer, and knows what we've been working on, so she tried to train the same things with him. She trained him in-hand a couple of times and rode him once, so it was a light week for him :)

M took care of him in the weekends. On Sunday she rode to HRK and jumped him in their outdoor jumping arena. He's never been in the jumping arena before, and was very tense initially, spooking a couple of times at silly nothings. She started out by riding him over ground poles scattered around the arena until he calmed down and she was able to keep a steady rhythm over and between the poles. After a few small warm-up cross rails they jumped a course of 5 60-80cm jumps twice. He was cool with most of the jumps, but there was one with scary wavy planks that he really didn't like - until they put a regular round pole above the top wavy plank, then he jumped it without hesitating :P Silly pony...