Curly Standard Place: Update from CSP :)

Hello!

I have been very busy with many horse activities this summer, so here is a little report of the last two weekends!

Weekend before last five of us took our horses to the Ride Over the Rainbow Ride in Merritt, BC - I am very happy to report that THREE of the horses were Curlies - yay! My daughter Anastasia was riding *Poplar's Bijou, my son Shane was riding *Cuervo and we have an agricultural engineer student with us from France and we decided to put another of the Curlies here back to work and so she brought *Kobee. *Kobee is a son of *Sandman and out of my beloved, deceased mare Gracie. *Kobee was born here, sold to my daughter's best friend, I trained him to ride as a three year old and then he has been only trail ridden since then, but not for the last year as his young owner is across the country at school at the moment. So we asked a lot of this young horse to go and do a 25 mile endurance ride and admittedly we did go slow for his sake but he did not disappoint us and did a GREAT job promoting Curlies for us!

A word about feet, when we arrived at the endurance ride we realized that *Bijou had lost a shoe - she only wears them on the front - actually she has really great hard feet, but she was a little ouchy this spring on the rocky terrain here and so I put front shoes on her for the first time. There was a farrier there at the ride and we planned to have a shoe put back on her in the morning - but he would be there after the other riders left. So in the a.m. we all got ready and.....no farrier - so after waiting about 20 minutes I decided that we would go on the first loop with just one shoe - I knew she had really great feet and I also knew we would be taking it somewhat easy as this was *Kobee's first ride (he was barefoot too!). So we went and did the first loop and she was just great - we got back and that foot didn't even have a chip or anything out of it - the farrier put a shoe on her and we were good to go for the second loop. We all completed the ride and it was a really wonderful day all around!

Yesterday we again took THREE Curlies to a dressage show in Vernon, BC. I brought Sandman, Anastasia brought Bijou and our student again brought Kobee. We asked a lot of my student to be bringing Kobee to these events - he is a VERY good boy, but his formal training really did stop after I rode him for 30 days - his young owner just wanted to ride him on the trails so that is what they did. But, as you can see, this is a very fine horse and he could do so much more and do a super job too. There were some very very nice comments about him after she did her tests - about what a lovely mover he is, which I of course already knew, but wonderful to hear it from other people :) The judge was impressed with him too - even though it was his first time in the ring, she noted what a willing horse he is :)