A bright and early morning once the fog burned off, with lots of activity at the main barn in anticipation of the start of the Gait-way horse show. I walked down and offered my help, moved a few chairs, etc., but they pretty much had everything under control. I was asked to hand out the ribbons after each class, simple enough, but I had a great seat to watch everything, which made it nice. Frankly, I've never been much involved with horse shows of this kind, I always thought they were too subjective, and there wasn't enough participation to make it a real competition. Even with the big show in Miami, there were many classes with only one horse registered, so to me, it makes a blue ribbon kind of like worthless. In the case of this show, each ribbon earns the owner points towards the Paso Fino Nationals, so it held some significance for that reason, but it wasn't really a competition, it seemed more like people just buying a ribbon. This was a much smaller show than Miami (which was small enough, to my mind), and probably 85% of the classes only had one horse participating, so I can't say I found it all that interesting. Even the classes that had more than one horse, I couldn't really see how they were placed, as the ones I thought were out of control sometimes ended up winning. Sigh. Guess I'll just never understand it, but that's okay. The only judge I'm interested in is my horse's judgment of me on the trail, and vice versa. Nothing again folks who like the shows, I'm just not really one of them. I enjoyed handing out the ribbons, and talking with the folks there, and watching the horses, of course, but the competition itself didn't do anything for me. Afterward, I decided to saddle up Flash and see how he did on the trail course (again, there was only one competitor for that one, and it was the owner of the farm), and he did okay on some of the obstacles, but some things I didn't know how to tell him to do, like side passes, so we just skipped it. I took him over the sounding board because I always imagined he'd learned how to do that, but he hesitated at first, so maybe not. I gently persuaded him and he went, though he didn't really try to do the fino gait like they do in the big shows. I took him back and forth a few times on it, just to get him used to it, because if nothing else, it was like bridge practice. One of the other organizers name Megan told me I was really fortunate to have a horse as nice and willing as Flash (don't I know it!), though thought he was definitely more pleasure than show horse, which suits me just fine! After I put him away, they served up a big dinner which I shared with them, taking a plate back to Hubby. He had come out for a while earlier in the day for a couple of hours, but then went home when his back started to bother him. We settled in for a nice evening after our busy day!
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