Pootling around

Guess who came to meet me at the gate this morning for a good grooming...Yay!

And we had a repeat performance this evening!

As we'd had such a good trundle round yesterday I decided we could brave the wild blue yonder and actually have a mini in hand hack out tonight.
Off we went down the track but turned left this time to walk down the back of the fields and ..........Bailarina was great, right there in my hand, no hanging back, just nice, calm and forwards. Even when the boys came hoolying across the paddocks she gave a little whoohoo and gave me nothing more than a couple of jogging steps and settled right back down to our happy little pootling

Well that was until we got to about 25 feet away from the hay field and Little B spotted the newly bagged and wrapped monster blue Haylage bales!

Eyes on stalks she tucked herself behind me and let me go first, I just needed to be confident and keep marching on so she could trust in that. She had a couple of sticky moments but just a little encouragement and she kept going albeit quite gingerly.......

So up in the field and I asked her to trot on to totally unstick her and it worked, we almost had a game of longline tag around the bales...suddenly they weren't quite so scary!

I love opening her trot up inhand, she is so poised and very very good at watching me for cues to lengthen or slow down or stop, what a joy!! (I'm not sure I like all this running lark though I might get fit!!..lucky I had the foresight to stick my Trail shoes on rather than my yard boots lol!!)

That was good enough for today so we came back down the track at the front of the fields this time and even approaching the back of one of the yards where there was a bonfire she was still forward and with me...she had a little wibble as someone behind the hedge picked that moment to drag something very large and heavy across their yard, but no running, she just jumped and stayed with me, but very tense now. The chap was really apologetic, he must have seen B over the hedge doing a creditable giraffe impersonation cos he stopped and yelled sorry!

I was really pleased that she settled immediately as soon as the noise stopped and I was able to continue on with a loose line and her just "with" me.

Lots of scratches and another little groom and that was us done for the night, great progress!

I'm confident now that she has enough trust to start actually going out and about on proper walks - we have great off road hacking, and Captain the stalwart ex riding school shire cross is going to come and nanny us the first time out - he's a real old trooper who used to lead all the babies out so he really knows his job.