My Journey on Horseback – 6/10/24

Continuing on from my last post, I have had quite an exciting, three-year process and journey of horseback riding. It all started a little before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The summer before this, my family and I were in Mexico. A guy on the beach was handing out horse back rides on the boardwalk of the beach. I wanted to go so bad, so my mom registered us for it. The next day, the guy was nowhere to be seen.

Obviously because of this, I was extremely unhappy. I was in third grade, and the pandemic spread everywhere. Once the vaccines started to get released and the lockdown was getting removed, I begged my mom for horseback riding lessons. She gave it to me and that is when I started to go for Western group classes at Garrod Farms.

Garrod Farms, the area where I take classes.

There were four different levels with different time slots. I started to get used to the feeling of riding a horse, and started quickly advancing to the next levels. Once I was on the third level, my mom started learning about English events. These events were way more interesting to me than Western, so my mom pulled me out of the group lessons, and put me in semi-private English lessons with my instructor Pablo.

Once I was in English riding, it was way more different than I thought it would be. The saddle was different, and the stirrup and the way you hold the reins were too. My first class was crazy. I still look back on it today, when Pablo tells me about it and we get a good laugh out of it.

The horse I was riding for about a year and a half (her name is Princess)

I started show jumping, but only tiny jumps. I was improving day by day, and my coach told us about leasing a horse. This is when you ride your instructor’s horse, but at a more expensive cost. I was thrilled at the idea. I started leasing a horse and my sister did too. My horse was named Princess. She is so cute. I still ride her to this day. As time progressed and we were in October-November of 2023, we started getting ideas of going to a horse show.

In my last blog post, I talked about this show. It was thrilling, and my sister and I started training for it. She got a different horse, because the one she had was not very tame, and he is so cute. In April of 2024 we reached our horse show, and then last weekend we had our second one. This is where I am today, and I am sad that I am leaving Princess for a bigger horse, but I’m a better rider than I was before. See you next time, and hope you enjoyed my journey from August 2021 to June 2024 (I haven’t stopped yet).