Last Saturday I decided to go riding in the outside arena... silly me :D
I thought Chumpy was going to be fine, I had been riding him regularly (5-6 times a week)
I put my draw reins on him just in case.
I started riding and he was very highly strung... which was acceptable as he hadn't been ridden outside for a few weeks due to the weather.
He was a pretty good boy other then the fact that he kept getting scared from an invisible monster behind the horse trailers at the side of the arena.
I got trotting, obviously he was running around like a maniac as usual. It was okay because he never acutaly does anything bad he just runs around :D
Then it happened...
He jumped because of the monster and I as a reflex pulled the reins, and the draw reins kind of got stuck in the bit so his mouth was being pulled all the time. He reared once in which I fell forward, then after a few more buck/rears I smashed into his neck twice. The first one was okay, the second one consisted of me smacking my face into his neck, I blacked out for a second, and as soon as I came back from the grey zone I felt something coming out of my nose...
I quickly got off (Chumpy just stood there like a good boy) and checked, and yes it was blood. My mouth and nose were bleeding and I was dizzy.
Lovely...
My friend ran over took Chumpy as I went inside to get myself into presentable form.
In the end I got back on with my trainers help and did like 3 rounds of walking (in the indoor of course) 2 trot and like half an arena of canter just so neither me or the horse would be shaken from the 'incident'
I'll add a picture of my face... well... it wasn't pretty.
As you can see the right side of my nose was like 2x as big as it should. To this day it still hurts... my mouth took like 4 days to stop hurting and mine. I wouldn't say I'm fine now one week later, but me and Chumpy are unfazed :D
I went to the doctor who told me that I didn't have a concussion, thank goodness.
I am now known as 'the girl who smashed her face'
YAY for me (Y) :D
Well hello everyone!
So I have FINALLY gone and bought myself my dream horse :3
After looking everywhere and spending a small fortune on vets and fuel...
I decided to stop looking on facebook and horse selling websites because they were all great on paper and then when I drove (sometimes even 3 and a half hours) to try them... they were nothing like what I expected. Some were extremely slow, others were uncomfortable.
I will write another post with pictures about the horses I tried and vetted and why I didn't choose them.
Back to the main point of this post :D
I phoned a lot of stables from the web, hoping that they had better horses for sale than the ones that I had been viewing so far, and thank goodness, I was pleasantly surprised. A rather large amount of them DID, and they weren't overpriced like the ones online.
Unfortunately some were still out of my price range, were too old or mares (I have a rule about not buying a mare, we just don't get along) etc...
The last person I phoned told me that he had a horse I might like but he's a bit old (8 y/o and my maximum was 7) but I thought stuff it, I've been looking for horses for the past half year, this horse is exactly what I want and only a 40 min drive away. One criteria isn't going to stop me. The owner told me to go try the horse the next day :O which was a big omg for me after having to phone some owners about 4 times over 2 weeks before getting an appointment to see the horse...
Fast forward to the next day I drove with my friend to (as it turns out) the owners stable. But to my surprise it wasn't just any stable it was an actual sport stable with an indoor and everything. It was beautiful, but that's not the point :D
I saw Pandur he looked really good, but I had seen it all before, the horse looks good then when you get on your think nowayyyy. The owner took the bride out, which had a really harsh pelham on it. I thought oh yiiiss this is what I was waiting for. The reason this amazing horse is so cheap, he's a maniac and I'm going to die...
The guy got on warmed the horse up then told us to put some jumps up.. ( I thought to myself what? He can jump ? Turns out yes... He can and he competed in 110cm in 2014) In the end the horse jumped a 140cm high 60cm wide oxer with no problem.
Then it was my turn.. Oh goodness, well other then the fact that I can't jump, I'm scared as hell because the horse looked like a handfull.
To my surprise the horse was a doll I was shaking like hell about having to jump him, but he did everything to calm me, he didn't rush to or from the jump, he calculated the distances for me, I just sat there and smiled . As you can see in the video below the only problem with him was that he loved jumping so much that when he saw the guy putting the jump higher he got rather pumped up, and that's why I was cantering like a mad woman around the arena for a while :D
I came away from the experience thinking wow. I have wasted over half a year looking for the perfect horse and 48 hours ago I was sitting at home with a tub of ice cream contemplating life and where I messed up and now here I am basically ready to buy this horse, MY horse.
I talked to the vet who came to check the horse the next week, almost everything was fine until he said that there seems to be something funky with his right hoof... (I was about to cry at this point because I had heard it all before) He checked the horse on the lunge line.. He saw a tiny bit of lameness... and told me that there can be numerous reasons for this, it might just be that he was having an off day...
I talked to the owner and we agreed that I could try the horse for a week and if nothing happened (lameness etc..) then I would buy the horse.
The next videos are of me riding the horse on the 'tryout week'
Other than my terrible riding skills, you can see that the horse has no balance (thus the pace changes) and his canter needs a lot of work. But on the flip side I showed the videos to my vet and he said that he didn't see any lameness.
That weekend (2014 October 5th) we went and paid for the horse (I guess this is the point where I should stop calling him 'the horse' and start calling him 'Pandur' or as I named him 'Chumpy') he boarded the horse float like an angel.
An hours drive and we arrived at my boarding stable :)
There are pictures of his first few days. He seems to be having fun :D
He's such a mellow horse, I couldn't have asked for a better horse. I have videos of me riding him the day after his arrival (just can't find them ofc), and he couldn't care less. If anything he was even more calm then at the other place (maybe because I use a plain snaffle on him and don't yank his mouthjust sayin')
He still has a lot to learn for example how not to fall over. Gosh it was just a few days ago that he tripped and smacked his head into the ground and I hit my head (helmet) onto his shoulder and he got up. At least he didn't fall over totally. (His last owner always had him on short reins and he got used to that, and when I rode him I let him have longer reins, so his balance point shifts and he can't carry himself well yet with this shifted balance point, therefor he keeps wanting to fall on his head...)
