May Long Weekend = Horses

In Canada Queens birthday is a long weekend in May. I am told that is always snows May long weekend. At the beginning of the week it seemed strange that it would snow as it was a lovely warm weather when we had the school group in. I even played a night game with the kids, had to wait till after 10 for it to even begin to get dark and I did not even have a jacket on.

But the snow did come, this was the view on Thursday and Friday morning out the lounge window at home. I am very thankful that the weather was warm again for the weekend.

 I have spent the weekend out at Cecil Lake learning about horses and doing lots of riding. The reason for this is so that I will be able to go on the Blueberry trails camp as a leader. It is our last camp for the summer and is a week long trails ride. We will ride each day then camp somewhere each night.

The first job for the weekend was to clear rubble and trees from the coral that the horse would be in. This definitely required gloves as there was still a bit of snow. The next job was to clean and treat my saddle and bridle.

This is me on Bandit at the end of Sundays riding. The couple who own him have said that I can use Bandit for the summer. So I will be looking after him at camp and then riding him for the trails ride. He is a tall horse. 16hand to the withers. (4inches in a hand and the withers are the shoulders)I can stand up straight under his chin.

 The above are pictures from our Sunday ride. It was four hours and there were 7 of us. In total I spent about 10 hours in the saddle over the weekend. Surprisingly I am not even sore, but I think the saddle is more comfortable than my kayak seat.

Over the weekend I saw various different animals. I saw a fox, a beaver, several young black bears, an elk, woodpeckers and this is some baby boisons that are at a farm so not really wildlife.