Five Day Challenge - Day 4

16. One thing I would change about my horse
I'd make Buddy younger.  I wish he was 10-12 so I could keep him longer and wouldn't feel so bad about pushing him to the 3'.

17. Your future with horses
I plan to ride for as long as I can.  Phoenix will live with me forever, and long term if McKenna works out I'd love to breed her and raise a baby.  My barn owners talk about me taking over the place once they retire, but who knows.

18. Worst show ever
There's been a few with Phoenix that were pretty bad.  I think our worst was in 2006 we went to our first A show and it was a disaster.  We started by getting to the show grounds (4hrs away from home) at midnight (we got lost), found horses in our stalls and had to find two stalls together and threw the horses in them. By the time we got to the house we had rented for the week it was close to 2am and we had to get up at 6 to get back to the show.  The hot water heater at the house broke so for the whole week we had to take cold showers. As far as riding goes, we were warming up for a 2'6" jumper round when another girl crashed her horse into a jump in warm up ring right in front of me. They had to take her away by ambulance.  It freaked me out and I locked up and couldn't seem to go faster than a crawl.  We ended up scratching our jumper rounds and switched to the 2' hunters, but I was still freaked and we still barely made it around. It was not a fun week.

19. Favorite horse show venue
My all time favorite is the Del Mar Fairgrounds in San Diego.  I only showed there once in high school but it was awesome.  The fairgrounds is also home to the Del Mar Racetrack, and they use the backstretch of the track as the warm up rings. Some of the OTTBs have a hard time with that, but it was fun.  My trainer let me do my first jumper class there, and they held the jumpers in the giant Del Mar Arena where they hold $100,000 GPs.  It was late at night, and we were under the lights, and it seemed like a fairytale.

The cover was added after I rode there

20. Show day routine
Usually I try to have the trailer packed the night before, if I can.  I'll wake up too early, get dressed then head out to the barn to hook up the trailer.  Grab anything I didn't load already then load the pony and go.