2010-Florida!

Florida...where I plan on spending every winter for a very very long time! Things have been great down here. I first drove down with my dressage trainer, Alison Sader Larson, to Palm Beach Gardens and stayed with her for a little while, helped her get settled and the horses settled. I returned home for the Holidays and headed out on the road again to Palm Beach Gardens to spend a week with Alison until the horses arrived. I headed north to Ocala on Saturday the 16th to meet my horses and my event trainer from Michigan, Philippa Humphreys as well as another family from Minnesota, the Schweiss'. Autumn & Lark Schweiss are living down in FL with Philippa and me, then the family, dad-Mike, mom-Julie, and sister-Brook come down on weekends for horse shows.

The first week we made sure to have the horses all settled in and did a lot of road work and hacking. Then we got to work. I have Hannah down here, as well as a sale horse, Maximum Eclipse, aka Max. I have met some cool people down here. I began immediately looking for work right away and found a job at the tack store, The Winning Edge. I work Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at the shop. Each day I get up around 7am, feed the horses, clean stalls and begin the day!

I am currently enrolled in 3 classes through UW-Stout that are offered online, so I have to stay on top of my schoolwork. The days here are long and filled so by night we are all ready for bed nice and early!

Max is a really great horse. He would be perfect for a young teenager looking to get some show experience. He would do amazing as a jumper or a lower level event horse. Perfect horse for a pony clubber looking to move through the ratings. In the summer of 2009 he was the horse Annie Jones rode to achieve her B USPC rating.

I have completed my first show of the season, Rocking Horse I. We competed in the I/P division. Hannah was great, her dressage was nice and steady, I thought she deserved a better score than a 39, but in comparison to the rest of the class we were placed right in the middle at 6th place. Following dressage we had show jumping, the track was proving to be difficult for a lot of the horses. Even the 4 star horses who were just coming back to for the 2010 show season were having rails and time faults. We had one rail and added on a few time faults but even with that it moved us up two places to 4th place. The cross country track was really friendly for a first show. Lots of galloping fences and not too technical. I felt very comfortable going out. Hannah felt as if she was right back in the middle of show season and knew exactly what her job was. We jumped clean and came home inside the time moving us up to finish in 3rd place.

It was a great first show! The next show is going to be Rocking Horse III the third weekend in February and we will be doing Intermediate in preparation for the CIC2* at Otter Creek in May. I look forward to seeing everyone at the horse shows! Stay tuned!