Tuesday, July 22, 2008

The Cake Walk

I'm a bit too tired to recount my talk at leadership camp right now -- been pretty busy lately, but I promise I will tell it soon. To hold you over, here is the story of the now-infamous Cake Walk that used to be an entertainment activity at OHSET (equestrian team)!

It was held on Friday nights, I believe, before Grand Entry. Or something. It was a fund raising event; each team was asked to bring a cake to be auctioned off, and all the money was put into the pot. The total money was split: half to the team that came up with the idea and set it into place, and half to the team that won the event.

Anyway, it went a little like this:

Each team selects a member representative. Generally chosen are the daredevils with really, really fast horses. In the center of the largest arena, they set up a giant circle of cones -- one less cone than there are riders. They play music as everyone lopes around the perimeter of the circle. When the music stops, the riders stop, jump off, and grab a cone, though stopping before jumping is sometimes skipped. One rider is left without a cone, they're out, and so it goes.

Not too bad, though sometimes people trip and fall going after the cones. The center circle gets smaller and smaller as more people are eliminated.

Then there's two people left.

They put one really big cone in the middle. Dead center. They tell the two remaining people to gallop around the whole outside of the arena. When the music stops, they both gallop hell-bent for leather towards the center to leap off and grab the cone.

Two people galloping towards each other on gaming horses, both dead set on grabbing that stupid cone! Yay!

Dangerous? Oh hell yes.
But my goodness, it was exciting to watch!


Needless to say, the Cake Walk was discontinued rather quickly.

3 comments:

mugwump said...

Our version was called musical tires....Mort was good at it, he'd pin his ears and bare his teeth at the other horse racing for our tire. We were pretty good at that one. Made up for getting dragged around in Halter, run off with in Pleasure, etc. I think you and Mckinna seem to be connecting just fine.

ezra_pandora said...

Oh my goodness. That would be quite entertaining to watch. Crazyness. Did you actually participate or just watch?

manymisadventures said...

Nope, I never participated!

It was nixed after my first year, during which I didn't ride anyway. No, our team representative was a girl who rode a very very fast Paint. This girl was hilarious to watch -- all arm and leg, she was *so* tall. And when she rode, it seemed like she was all over the place just because she was so long, but she was an incredibly effective rider.

She nearly won the cake walk at the first meet, too. Down to the final two and she backed off because she didn't want to collide with the other girl.

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