I finally got to the beach to ride today, now that beach riding season is almost over. What a beautiful day it was. The temps were in the 50's and it was a bright sunny day. Linda was going with me today. Low tide was at 3:00 pm. So, I told her I'd sleep when I got home from work and plan to get up around noon time and call her when I was pulling out of my yard to come pick her up.
I did manage to get up right at noon. I had a quick sandwich and coffee then went out to load Louie. The yard is all either snow or mud. Yuck!!!! Louie actually caught me and didn't even load too badly. He put up his usual token resistance then hopped in and went right to pawing of course. I then went to Linda's to pick her up. her horse, Gus, loaded good too, and commenced to pawing. When we got to the state park parking lot we realized we had forgotten to call ahead to let them know we were coming. We tried to call the park ranger from the parking lot but had no cell reception. So, we just hoped we would not get in trouble. Louie was quiet while being tacked up. But, when I went to mount, he wouldn't stand still. He is VERY good about being mounted so that let me know he was nervous. After a few tries, I did get him to stand and got mounted. Just as we were heading across the parking lot, a man came by us on a bicycle and started riding circles around us taking pictures. I was very pleased that Louie was not concerned about that at all. As we approached the access path to the beach, we see there are several dozen people there working on the path. This concerned Gus more then Louie but both went though fine though Louie did drop them a nice splatter of diarreah. Sigh.
Once onto the beach, Louie was quite nervous, but he behaved quite well. What DID scare him were the changes in the color of the beach sand. And the places where the sand was rippled! Whoa, serious mule eating sand!!!!! Took a minute to convince Louie that these things were ok. Then we went around a point on the beach and there were hundreds of big chunks of ice laying all over the beach of varying sizes some being VERY big. Double scary!!! I rode up to one that was very flat on top and had Louie walk up onto it and across it. With the warm day, it was soft and snowlike on top so not slippery. But, it would collapse a bit with each step. Nothing dangerous
but scary for Louie. He did great though and I got him to cross one several times. We had to take turns leading as neither Louie or Gus are super bold. And we played "bumper equines" a bit at first as they kept trying to be glued to each other.
We did some nice long trots and a bit of cantering. One time when Linda got ahead, Louie got a bit worried and/or excited and thought about doing some bucking. He did get his body twisted at an odd angle and for a second feet were going in some strange directions but I was able to stop him before he actually launched into real bucking. Naughty boy. BUT, good boy for stopping when told to! And, he hasn't been ridden outside in nearly 3 months so I was really pleased at how well he behaved. When we came back up the access path back to the parking lot, I dismounted and did my best to disperse and cover with sand Louie's diarrhea splat. You are supposed to pick up any manure but how do you pick up a watery splat.
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