You Go Girl!

Hi. Many Misadventure’s mom here. Misadventures is off to a leadership camp this week and she asked me to post for her about the great weekend she just had at an eventing camp. We got home from Inavale at 1:00 PM today and she left for her other camp at 3:30. Busy girl… So here’s my perspective of the weekend.

By the way, for those of you wondering, Pandora is happily resting in a large paddock with McKinna, eating a lot and getting her daily dose of bute. Fortunately she’s been mellow because the vet said “no running!”, and she would be crazy if confined to a stall. Keep your fingers crossed that she trots off sound next weekend after she goes off the bute.



Anyway… The Inavale Eventing Camp is a camp that Misadventures has had planned for months. She loves Inavale and loves the trainer that does the cross country portion. She and Pandora had just done Lily Glen and she felt their cross country had reached a new level. Needless to say, she has really been looking forward to it. Then, a little over a week ago Pandora came up head bobbing lame and was prescribed paddock rest and bute for two weeks. What a bummer in so many ways! She thought about withdrawing from the camp. She was not only disappointed, but worried about Pandora and didn’t think it would be any fun.

After it had a chance to sink in we started talking about it and decided there’s no sense skipping the camp when she has a perfectly good backup horse. Why not go, have fun and get McKinna ready to take her to her Pony Club D3 rating at the end of the month. She knew she would need to use McKinna because Pandora would only be back in work a week at the most by then and she certainly wouldn’t want to push her and hurt her. What better way to prepare for her rating than an eventing camp. Of course, she didn't want to hurt McKinna either so she told herself she wouldn’t be able to do as much with McKinna, but she’s still go and have fun. She figured she’d explain to the instructors that McKinna was out of shape so she’d take it slow and stop when McKinna was tired.

So McKinna got pulled out of the pasture and put to work. Poor pony. Let me give you a quick review – Misadventures evented with McKinna last summer, did a little bit of stadium jumping with her in November and December and then pretty much turned her back over to me full time (She’s actually my horse) because she started working with Pandora in earnest at the start of the year. I am nowhere near the rider Misadventures is so McKinna had it pretty easy. I’d even go as far as saying she was semi-retired :) Not only that, but through a series of circumstances I hadn’t ridden her at all for about a month. Add to that the fact that they’d recently been turned out into the big mare pasture 24/7 and that’s what Misadventures had to work with. Notice the belly.

They had about a week so they started slowly, worked nearly every day, and by early this last week we were very proud of that little mare. She is such a quick learner and loves to work once you get her going. You could actually see her change physically too. She lost the bloated hay belly look and started to look like her old self.

So off we went Thursday afternoon to a weekend of fun. This is what my little mare had transformed into.
I can’t tell you how proud I am of BOTH of them! Stay tuned for Day 1 of the camp!