Negotiating my way from the B&B to the riding centre was pretty interesting. What with the roads being measured for car widths by someone squinting and tilting their head and saying "Yeah, I'm pretty sure two cars can fit through there", conveniently leaving out the caveat "if they both have their wing mirrors tucked in and one of them is a bicycle". Let's just say there was a lot of squealing and praying to the powers that be that I and my rental car would get through each pass alive. Particularly humourous were the signs that indicated the road was about to get narrower. Ha. Ahahaha!
Anyway. Horse riding. This was an exclusively clydesdale stable, and it was kind of exciting to stand looking up (and up, and up) at these massive animals, wondering how the heck you were going to get on it. Fortunately there were correspondingly massive stepladders (I still managed to flop rather ungracefully over the horse's back. How is it that I've been riding for as many years as I have without yet mastering the mounting procedure?). Anyway, here's Gypsy:
You can see the step ladder at the horse behind her.
Having arrived in my usual completely-unprepared-for-the-elements style, I was properly kitted out and covered head to toe in waterproof gear and boots. Snug as the proverbial bug.
Hmm. Doesn't look as big here as she did from the ground. Anyway. Gypsy was also the trail leader Andy's favourite horse/thing in the world, so I had no choice but to be delighted. I pretty much was anyway. Andy took us through some nearby paddocks so that we could try out the clydesdale canter - I can tell you right now, it's intense. Imagine wheeling down a field of green with the thunder of dinner-plate-sized hooves all around you.
So now that we were familiar with our horses (phrases like "have control over" were bandied about and I can tell you for free that there was no such thing. Gypsy figured out pretty early (probably at the mounting stage) that she was bigger 'n me, and I had to point her in the opposite direction if I wanted to stop her from just moseying on) we set out over farm lands, through streams, and with many, MANY a canter. It. Was. Marvellous.
I didn't get many photos but whenever we stopped I tried to snap something while Andy wasn't looking.
The high point (so to speak) of our ride was climbing the fell - to the layperson this meant urging our horses up incredibly steep and narrow tracks to the top of a mountain. Hurrah! Look how atmospheric!
Once at the top we were allowed (some of us [me] grinning to our heart's content) to canter around the flat top of the mountain. We need a new word for "intense".
(I believe at this point I was heard to utter: "Seriously? We're allowed to do this? Whee!")Of course, while all this is going on, there was a problem with my saddle.
It was all my own fault, really. See, whenever I go riding and there's someone who talks just that bit too much about all the riding they've done and all the horses they've ridden, you just know that reality isn't going to quite match up with expectation. Maybe there's some nervousness behind it all. Anyway. I did it. I committed the cardinal sin of Talking Too Much.
As soon as I was up someone came over to point out that my saddle was drifting to the right. This, they explained, was either due to me not sitting right (i.e., leaning too far to the right) or the horse not standing right (i.e., leaning too far to the right) or some combination of the two. The solution, apparently, was for me to try to shift it back every now and then by putting all my weight on my left leg and jumping around. You can bet this went down really well in practice, with Gypsy taking any kind of movement from me at all to mean "Let's go now!"
While this was pretty annoying, it held up well until we'd gotten to the bottom of the fell again. My leg muscles were non-existent and playing around with weight while looking at a steep drop seemed a very stupid idea. At any rate, we made it to a flat little valley and were offered one more canter. It was only at the end of this that I felt something was not right. Something, in fact, was Wrong.
Cue, my worst nightmare, and a flashback of the time I broke my shoulder blade. Saddle tipping, world tipping, should've fished my feet out of the stirrups but no time and PLOP! What a long way towards the ground! This all happened, I should point out, while Gypsy was more or less completely stationary and slightly confused. By sheer luck (absolutely no horsewomanship of my own here, at ALL) I fell onto an uphill slope and the ground was nice and soft.
Once I'd gotten my breath back and managed to get into a standing position (nothing broken! And this despite falling on the same previously-wounded shoulder. YAY!) the dilemma remained of how to get back on the horse without any giant stepladders. Poor Andy had to dismount (no one else had done so and I don't blame them in the slightest) and give me a leg up. Thus began the second and much more embarassing part of the debacle.
He asked if I had gotten a leg up before. I said yes, because at one long-distant pony lesson, I had been given a leg up onto a small white pony. I'll leave Irony to point and laugh. My understanding is that the person is supposed to swing their leg over and climb lightly onto the horse. This, of course, once you've taken into account a) how short my legs are and b) how large Gypsy's back was. It did Not Go Well.
So there I was, sitting on Gypsy's back. Just not on the saddle. That was still in front of me, and had to be clambered over on all fours. Absolutely no sympathy from my fellow riders, who were lucky to still be on their horses, given how hard they were laughing.
Made it back to the farm in time to beat most of the rain, took the horses through a stream to wash their feet and stopped to tell the story of How I Fell Off to everyone else at the stable.
Ah well. In the future I shall riding shetland poines and telling people that I have done "some riding", and leaving it at that.
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