Last Sophomore Ride! 10-12-13

Today was very well my last ride on Sophomore 1. Now I have 4 weeks or so between my next ride because in 2 weeks is Annual Show so we don't ride then sometime after that will be Promotion Saturday where we get our Junior Teams and our Base Teams! That's also when we will finally get to use spurs. So anyway today I got Ashley #71!!! She is a shorter white horse with a small bump on her back which is how you tell her apart from the other horses. So I went out to the pasture to look for her and they tried to give me Cinder! She tried to buck me too I was like thank goodness I didn't have her,that would have been worse than having Duke! I was so glad I didn't get him again! She was such a sweet heart for grooming she stood quietly and didn't fuss. She did like to take up a lot of space on the rail though. She has giant feet! I was like whoa, for such a small horse your feet are huge! She is one of the shorter horses so mounting up was really easy. It wasn't as muddy today! It actually dried up some! But it was cold. I wore my Westernaire Sweatshirt but forgot my leather gloves. We rode down to the Moore Arena and checked our cinches. She didn't bloat at all so her cinch was still nice and snug. We started out with our regular warm up. Her trot is SO SMOOTH! She is such a comfortable ride. She listens to leg cues well but doesn't like to trot through the circles so it takes a little more effort. Then we got to LOPE! Finally after 8 weeks! I got to lope again! Ashley's lope is weird! She lopes with her front feet but her back feet were still trotting... It was interesting. It was harder to ride but, hey, it was still loping and I wasn't riding Duke so I was smiling. Then we rode in 4's and Ashley listened great! We had to circle and reverse and go down the center and split at the rail. We then got to try a pass through again! We actually looked really good! It took us a few tries. Eventually we looked like a team. I really wanted to try a thread the needle again but oh well. We were still doing drills at least. Then we got into 8's and man, you really have to double the spacing. My 8 had to ride in an 11 because we had the extra people. It is really hard. We did circling and we kept it together fairly good but all the drill teams make it look so easy! It's not fair! My ticket count is 17! I am almost to 20 tickets. Some people on  my team are already at 60! I don't understand how they do it.... Ticket Turn In is on the 24th and Annual Show is the 26th and 27th. Sophomores are watching the Saturday afternoon show. After that will be Promotion Saturday but I don't know exactly what day yet. Here are are some Pictures!

Ashley and I on the rail

Riding in an 11 I am the white horse closest to the rail

Ashley and I - BEAUTIFUL