Listen to Your Mother

I spent a lot of time at this horse show remembering the away shows that my parents used to come to with me. I miss them! Parents, if you are reading this, please come back! Neither of my parents are horse people, but both of them learned a few helpful skills along the way, and both eventually drove the horse trailer for me at some point. My dad was a shoe-in for this role, having spent the better part of his young adult life with his racer attached to a van, trolling around north america in a points chase, but even mother dear ran a shuttle service for me once from the barn to my school so that I could get to a horse show before midnight (thanks, mom!) I wish I still had the picture we took of the time that she oiled a hoof. Anyways, I thought I would do a little mini post before my epic one on various things I have tried to save money at shows on a few of her lessons that I was reminded of on my trip.

• Put some blush on! I don't know why exactly this one came to me over a horse show, but it's her favorite beauty advice. No matter how late I am running or how little sleep I have gotten, I always make myself put on a swipe of eyeliner on the upper lid and a coat of mascara. It makes you look more in control of yourself and well rested than you will feel. I encourage my readers to pick a non-negotiable beauty ritual to bring with you on the road. Everyone has their thing.
• Don't drive with those boots! I had to show in my schooling tall boots this weekend, and did not think to bring any other form of footwear with me except the high heals I started my journey with. Bad idea. Bring a pair of shoes to drive in if you have a trip that is more than an hour or two. Your ankles and feet will thank you, even if you suddenly are just wearing weird pants out of context when you stop at gas stations rather than obviously being the horse person with the trailer.
• Can you feed this to a horse? This is one of her favorite questions, and it's something I have stopped doing but should make an effort to start again. Always offer horsie a bite. You never know what strange food they end up liking. Just make sure you have common edible illegal substances on the top of your head when you do this. Lego loved oreo cookies, but cocoa powder=caffiene, so he only would get them after the last day had finished and I knew he wouldn't be tested, provided there was more than two weeks before the next show.
• Take the interstate! This is one area my parents differed, if there was an option of driving routes, my father would always go with the back roads for the view and my mother would stay on the interstate for the good signage and plentiful gas stations. If you have the horse trailer, unless you have driven the route before, take the interstate. Being close to a mechanic and a gas station is very important. Also, you know, highway patrol, for us single ladies.
• Don't go to sleep with dirty feet! This is a weird non negotiable from my childhood that has stuck with me. I just can't do it. I'm not really suggesting it to the audience, just noting an odd habit we share.
• Did you bring something nice to wear to dinner? Hah, I have been able to change for dinner a grand total of three times in my show career, every other time has been in my riding clothes. I persisted in bringing a nice outfit with me for a couple years though. Do keep a mental checklist of what you need to bring for yourself, though. It's so easy to forget your own bag when you are packing five separate bins/trunks/boxes for one horse (true story, more on that at some point) that I have often found myself without some crucial item. Pack yourself before you pack the horse, and write down everything you need to put in your bag the morning of.
• What kind of beer does Chris like again? Always have the kind of beer your trainer likes, even if now that you can legally drink you think it tastes like some bodily fluid of the devil. I'm talking about you, Miller Light. They have been putting up with you all day, they will probably need it.
• Can't you pay someone to do that so you can get some sleep? Now that the answer is always no, I am much much more cognizant of how wonderful my support crew was when I was showing in high school. Write your braider a nice note every so often, even if you rarely see him or her face to face, and always leave your check on Saturday night since they will want to leave before you do on Sunday.

That about sums up the list that has been floating around in my head. Next up is the varying levels of success that my money saving budget cuts have had.

Budget Fail Part 3: The Actual Horse Showing Part

Ladies and Gentlemen, this might just be the final installment of the series detailing my adventures at the December Classic Horse Show at the Carolina Horse Park . In the light of day, and with some sleep to encourage me to be reasonable, I realized how LOVELY the grounds were. The stalls are 10 by 12, larger than usual, and have rubber mats, which are a luxury not generally found at shows. Each stall has sturdy, professionally installed eye hooks for buckets, as opposed to the u-nails that someone left there in the early eighties, and two outlets which appear to actually adhere to modern electrical code, another unusual feature. The only missing feature was hot water access, which I would have greatly appreciated that morning when it was still a chilly 45 degrees and Chico needed a bath. Hot water is a very rare amenity, though, so the facility still gets a great review from me. The footing was great and the warmup area was spacious, as were the rings. Thankfully the office staff got my stabling situation sorted out such that I could stay where I had camped the night before, and I let them know about my grooming stall since I am no good with deception.

It is at this point I check in on the rings and realize that I need approximately one more hour to prepare to go in the ring than I actually have available to me, because entries to the show were very very low and thus the rings were running faster than I had planned. I put in some particularly large braids to shorten the braiding process, skipped the cold bath and went over my horse with a damp towel, installed his fake tail, and gave him a few minutes to relax while I got my coat, number, and helmet on. It is at this point I notice that Megan is also getting her horse ready, which was problematic since she was the person who I was hoping could set the jumps for me in the warmup area. To any non horse people: when you are warming up for a class, you start working the horse on the flat, then begin with a low jump, and progressively make it larger and wider, usually to the size of the fences in the class. This is generally accomplished by having a person on the ground stake a claim on one of the fences in the warmup area (there are inevitably three) and then adjust the height and width for you. Without having one of those people, I had to just jump what was already there, which thankfully was a small vertical and a 3' oxer. I cantered back and forth over the vertical until I personally got my shit together, jumped the oxer, and headed to the ring all by myself.

Mr. Perfect, Chico, lit right up once he got into the ring, which is normal but not quite to the extent that was exhibited that day. In our warmup class, he actually SPOOKED at something outside of the ring on the way to the first jump, so I got after him, came back to it and tried to ride it in the way I would on a green horse who was stopping at a jump. I was sitting back in the tack, had my legs on, and steady contact on the reins. This time, Chico just plain stopped. I then took a moment to think of what my trainer, Chanda, would tell me to do, and walked up to it, let him sniff both sides, picked up an easy trot and gave him a long approach to the jump with my seat off his back, legs on, and very light contact, and he proceeded to jump the rest of the fences on the first try, which is what he usually does. Point taken, sir. You're allowed to have your occasional naughty moment, and I need to just deal, since you know more about this than I do. (Note: Chico is the only horse who gets this treatment, because he does, in fact, know more about show hunters than I do)

My first trip did not have anything that technically went wrong, since we took off an appropriate distance from all of the jumps, got the right number of strides in between them, and changed leads where it was necessary. That is why I won. It could not have been attractive, given that I wanted to go a full gear slower than he did, and most of the time between the fences was spent trying to slow the crazy old man down. I also subsequently added out of the corner in a couple places where I should not have. I let him nap and realize how exhausting that had been before our second class, and when we went back in, he was still fresh but much more rideable. We nailed most of the course, and on my way to the last line, a tight six, I thought "Grace, don't you dare pull on the reins and add a stride because you are winning this class". Of course, the combination of slowing down too much in preparation for the tight line and my decision to gun it for the long spot meant I had a really spectacular chip to that line. Way to overthink. There were only four in my division, so I still managed a third place finish.

I spent my "free" afternoon after the show doing all of my usual post horse show routines for horse care and then trying to find someone who could help me with my truck and trailer situation. One member of the show staff, Bob, helpfully offered to install a new jack if I would go buy one, which he described to me. Naturally, the one that I purchased would have worked on the vast vast majority of trailers, but mine has a welded plate in the way, so I later had to go back and buy a plain car jack, which we decided I would put on a section of 2 by 4 that he found for me and then use to jack the trailer up off the truck once I got home. He also fixed my hitch for me, which needed to be flipped so that the trailer would ride higher in the front and thus be level. I grabbed dinner for myself and Henry, and headed back to the show for night check and to braid for the next morning. I decided that to compensate for the very large braids of that morning, I would put in a ton of very small ones, which was a great idea until 20 minutes later when I had barely made progress down his neck and realized it was going to take an hour and a half to finish. Oh well. It looked pretty! I settled everyone in for the night and left what I thought was a particularly pretty setup:

The rings started earlier the next morning, and my age group's division was going earlier in the day, so even with the braiding already done, I didn't get to sleep any longer. Thankfully, my trainer Chanda's godmother, Judy Kelly, who is a famous and very knowledgable equestrian from the glory days of the sport, had run into me the day before and was able to set the jumps and coach me a little bit. Chico was not fresh like the prior day, and the combination of a little help to settle me down and having my normal horse back proved to be a very good one. We didn't win the hack class, which was a function of the judge's personal preference, since he has won some large hack classes at very prestigious horse shows, but I was not too concerned with that. We went out to warm up for the jumping classes, and after getting my bad jump out of the way, I settled right into the rhythm that we needed. My warmup and both classes both went very well, with the possible exception of the first jump in the second class which was spooky and thus merited a funny jump. We won both classes, and I received a score of 82 for my second class which was the first round of the WIHS/NAL classic. I was very pleased with that score, given that the first jump had been a little awkward, and it sent me into the second round as the leader. We also were champion of the division!

The second round would run after the older age group had finished, so I took the time to take Chico back to the barn to relax and pee, which he appreciated. Miss Judy had a prior commitment which prevented her from being able to school me again for the classic round, but Megan had finished for the day and very kindly messed up her tight schedule in order to set jumps for me. I warmed up quickly, and had a good round except he looked at that same jump along with an oxer which they had put in the ring specifically for the classic round, a bending eight strides after a two stride which was set on the judge's side of the ring. It was in an odd place, and I overdid it with the encouragement, which got us a little tight to that fence. He doesn't like when I get him close to the jump, and he was already a little wary of that fence, so I am sure the resulting effort was not attractive. We scored an 80 for that round, which is respectable, and I was very happy with him for being such a good sport about having to go back and jump again. Our combined score was leading when the adults finished, but I still had three children's hunters who were combined in the classic, so I left to purchase the aforementioned car jack with my fingers crossed that my position would hold. Much to my delight, it did, and I earned 140 points towards Washington and Harrisburg and 85 dollars.

Because I had to make a trip to fill up the truck and buy the jack and then find Bob and figure out how to get everything functional for the trip home, I was one of the last ones to leave the show grounds, but 5 PM isn't bad at all. The drive down taught me my lesson, and I took I-95 home, which was a total breeze and was 15 minutes shorter, even though the route was 40 miles longer. I encountered this magnificent truck stop which had a McDonalds attached, and I delivered the champion back to the farm safely.

I will follow up this post with one detailing my efforts at being the hunter princess on a budget, whether or not they were successful, and whether or not it's worth it. I will say this- I haven't entitled this series "Budget Fail" for no reason. While I am sure it would have been significantly more expensive if I had not taken the steps that I did, it still was not a cheap weekend by any means!

Budget Fail: Part 2-The Road Was the Easy Part

Let's begin this portion, which will hopefully be shorter than the novel I recently posted, with the map that Google presented to me when I looked for routes between my barn and the show grounds.

In an effort to save gas and therefore money, I thought taking the direct route would make sense, since I would be driving slower and for a shorter distance than if I took the interstate. Now, I am sure all of you who have sensible thought processes are thinking to yourselves, "But Grace, you left for a very long drive at 7 PM. Why would you take the back roads? What if something happened?" The answer to those questions is that I had not remotely considered that Route 15 was as much of a back road as it actually is. I was expecting it to be either 2 or 4 lanes, designed to be wide enough to accommodate trucking traffic, and the normal infrastructure that goes along with that kind of road. There are plenty of highways in the area like that, so it was not a total figment of my imagination, but it was really stupid of me to assume that just because the roads are under the same classification and have the same size line on a map, they are therefore somehow equal. No. In my defense, I will say that another competitor from my area who drives horses to that facility regularly uses that route and likes it, so maybe my issues were mostly related to the dark and not knowing what I was getting into.

Pictured is the portion of my route that travels through an area that is so rural that I was sure I had accidentally been transported to North Dakota or the surface of mars. My father, ironically, called me repeatedly on my trip down to check on my progress and lecture me on driving so late at night. (Hmm, why did I get on the road so late again?) My mother decided that I was, in fact, traveling through a dangerous war zone, and called about every 30-45 minutes. Both were following me on Google maps and would demand my location each time they called, so that they could inform me what I had just passed, (I know, I was there) what is coming up, (Yes, I have seen the sign that says Boomfuckville is this way) and then offer directions to me, as though I would stray from my printed out route while I was in the middle of nowhere in the night. The absence of cell service in the above pictured area of Virginia was particularly distressing to both of them, since it was one of the points of the trip where both were trying to reach me simultaneously, and neither could reach me. This of course meant that as soon as I reached Clarksville and got a signal, I had a barrage of text messages coming in from all sides which grew increasingly distressed. I adore both of them, and know that all of it was the two of them worrying about me and being unable to assist me in any other way, and looking back on it I am laughing, but at the time it was a lot to handle the truck and trailer, unfamiliar back roads at night, trying to find a gas station when there has not been a town for 20 miles and won't be another for 30, spotty to nonexistent cell service, and two parents to reassure. I suppose packing everything up and driving far away to a horse show is no longer a normal occurrence, which is why they both decided that this was the trip to be really worried about me, even though I have been driving horses to shows since I was 17.

Once I got to the Raleigh area, everyone had a big deep breath and a sigh of relief since I was back in populated areas. Wagon Wheel came on my playlist, and I took a second to be a loser and giggle that I was in the song. Everything was smooth sailing until I was close to the horse park, which is very far into the country. My friend, Megan, had called ahead of time to let me know that I needed to follow the directions on the website, not the ones that a navigation system sends you to, since that will be wrong and send you to the offices or something like that. She had also helpfully gone to find my stall assignment, which I appreciated immensely. I had called the show office earlier in hopes of finding that piece of information, and to confirm that my shavings would be waiting for me, and the lady in the office assured me that the stall chart at the entrance would have my stall on it and that the shavings would be there. Megan had also let me know where her stalls were, and warned me that the stabling situation was rather volatile and that everyone was moving around. She suggested that I claim that someone else's things were in my assigned stall and instead put my horse in the empty stalls on her aisle, which were vacated by the barn which was supposed to be there because of a broken board or something. I wasn't about to drag 8 bags of shavings across three barns when I got in, but I promised to consider it once I could scope out the situation.

I finally arrived at the show grounds about 5 minutes after I decided to find somewhere to turn around since I must have passed the place, and found the stabling chart. Of course, my name was not on the chart. It was not on C-22, which was the stall which the office had told Megan, but I decided to go there anyways, since there would be a big pile of shavings bags that would confirm that it was my stall. Although unoccupied, there was a dirtbike parked in C-22 and no shavings bags to be found. I therefore assume that it is not my stall, and proceed to walk around the barns while ranting on the phone to my dear Jacques, looking for the big pile of shavings bags that would mark my temporary home. I promise you, readers, that there were four bags of shavings in the stabling complex at 1 AM, all of which were scattered and obviously belonging to one barn or another. This caused a complete hissy fit worthy of any hunter princess. I was apparently loud and bitchy enough to alert the braiders, who I overheard asking each other who just pulled in and what her problem was. I thankfully had a spare bag in the truck from my morning errands, and the stall next to Megan's had a bag spread in it, presumably before the barn decided to vacate that block. Two bags, while unacceptable in comparison to my usual 8-10, is not COMPLETELY unacceptable in the way that bare ground would have been. I'm stabling with my friend after all, and if the office is upset in the morning, I had all kinds of pent up rage that was fueled by sleep deprivation that really needed a point of delivery. I hastily unpacked most of the trailer and threw everything but my trunk into the next stall down, deciding to use it as a grooming/tack stall and hoping that no one would notice since it was vacant anyways.

This is the point at which I would generally park the trailer, but we have that whole "trailer can not be detached from truck" issue, so I put the ramps back up and punched my hotel into my phone and headed there for a few hours of much needed sleep. I think I finally got to sleep at 3 AM and decided to "sleep in" to 6:30 since the ring started at 8. A quick check of www.horseshowsonline.com to see if the show had even received my entry informed me that the rings would be starting an hour later, which was a very welcome extra hour the alarm could be pushed back.

Budget Fail: Part 1-The Long Road to The Road

Because I am going to ramble when it comes to this horse show, I am going to start out this post with a few bullet points of important facts I learned over the weekend.

• If you want to show your horse on a budget, do not go far away. It does not work.
• There are parts of the state of Virginia that are so rural you can drive through them for 45 minutes without encountering a gas station or having cell service. God bless Eisenhower.
• REINFORCEMENT: People have trainers, haulers, braiders, and grooms for a reason. Those people sleep. I am unclear as to whether or not the aforementioned professionals do.
• No one is there to help you once you go through the gate. It is a very good thing to do some work on your own so you can school yourself once you get there.

So, let's begin with a little story about your resident hunter princess, myself. My mother calls me "her snake bit daughter". If you can imagine an obscure way for fate to just cause someone to have a really hard time with something, it's going to happen to me. This is important to keep in mind not just for this series, but throughout the blog. I have had friends ask me how it is that I always have a story to tell, and the bad luck combined with my tendency to be an airhead explain why. It just is the perfect storm of "hold on, you said WHAT happened?"

A congressman wanted to honor my late grandfather by flying a flag over the capitol building for a day in his honor and then presenting the flag to his family. The date for this event changed three times, starting in September. Naturally, last week my father announced that the ceremony would be Friday, the one day of the entire year that it would be most problematic for me. Any attempts to explain this to him delicately were not met well, so I resigned myself to a very, very long day. 6 AM wakeup call, dress up in business attire, makeup, hair, heels, the works. Drive to Orange, Virginia to pick up the feed I realized I was out of when I had packed the trailer and a couple other last minute items. Then head over to the vet to pick up a few medications that I keep with me at the show just in case. Having finished my errands (thankfully horse people are up early and getting all of this done before 8:15 was not a problem), I drove to Culpeper, Virginia, where my sister and I had planned to meet so that we could drive into DC together and use the HOV lane. Henry of course could not be stuck sitting in the truck waiting on us all day, so I checked him into Mountain Run Kennel for the day so that he could run around, and hoped and prayed that he would get plenty of exercise. The staff was as sweet and accommodating as could be, and the facility was a dog paradise, set in the middle of acres of farmland, so I felt good leaving him there. Poor Oliver was not so lucky, since he is not allowed to go in high traffic areas, much less a boarding facility, grooming place, dog park, or anything like that, because he is on a bunch of medications to suppress his immune system to treat his neurological condition. He spent the weekend at VETSS, the emergency veterinary clinic in Charlottesville that has treated him, and received his second round of chemotherapy from Dr. Miller with Virginia Vet Specialists who without question saved his life. I'll do a post on Ollie and his condition later.

Annie and I had been in communication the whole morning, starting when I called her to get her out of bed half an hour after she was supposed to be up, and she was still in recovery from the prior night's sorority date function. To those not familiar with the practices of the greek community, a date function is what fraternities and sororities will have as a social event, usually themed. The idea is that every member of the organization will bring a date (presumably of the opposite gender), hence the title, but I have never seen this actually executed with the sororities. Generally a bunch of sisters will bring good friends who are not in the sorority as their dates, or people will bring multiple "dates" with them, and it basically turns into a big fun theme party that you need to be invited by a sister to. Themes vary, but there will invariably a vast quantity of alcohol, beginning around 8 PM at several pregames, both organized by sisters and of the unorganized, "let's start drinking early and get dressed together" sort. The event ends at 2 AM, and while most people go home at that point, it seems that annie elected to attend a fraternity function that continued past that time. Needless to say, her 7:30 wake up call was received with bitterness and hostility that can only be compared to a terrorist group ranting about the evils of the United States. She also probably should not have been driving, and while I maintain that she would have been under the legal limit, she was not of the same opinion. The combination of sleep deprivation and residual alcohol was nevertheless not a good idea, but the drive to Culpeper from Charlottesville is a straight line on a 4 lane road, so I felt it was manageable provided she drank plenty of coffee and had a greasy breakfast. I had apparently underestimated the prior night's activities, since I had to stay on the phone with her for most of the drive, and she managed to hit a temporary construction sign that was in the median and damage her driver's side mirror.

Despite all the morning activities, we were actually exactly on time according to my schedule, which still had extra built in time for traffic and getting a little bit lost. The trip into DC was not too difficult, and after detailing all the events of the night before and purchasing a whole lot of gatorade, Annie took a long and much needed nap. An uncharacteristic lucky turn of events had me staring across an intersection at my father while I was on the phone with him trying to figure out the logistics of getting past the barricades and into the appropriate capitol parking garage. The ceremony was really lovely, and I had a good time seeing some extended family and hearing stories about my grandfather's influence in the community. I probably should not commit this to writing, but the most interesting part was when we briefly spoke about some political issues with the congressman, which is not remotely in the theme of this blog so I won't go there. Suffice it to say that I left DC wondering if there was any reliable source of information about political events available to me at all, short of living in the district and knowing everyone.

Of course, my plan that the ceremony would start promptly at noon, and that we could then be leaving the district by 1 or 1:30 was completely imaginary. Everything started at 12:30, took quite a while, and lunch was at an actual restaurant. We finally got going at 2:30 and, thanks to what I am sure was comparatively mild DC traffic, the 70 mile drive back to Culpeper took two hours. I grabbed Henry at 5, just before they closed, and began wondering how on earth I was going to drive nearly 6 hours to a show when it was getting dark before I even got to the barn.

I arrived to the barn with the vague memory that last time I was at my trailer, the ground had collapsed underneath my block, but assumed that just meant I might have trouble getting the coupler high enough to get onto the ball, which has happened before and I have been able to handle it. In order to explain the issue, let's first look at a picture of a trailer jack:

The jack basically consists of two metal tubes, one smaller and one larger, and a crank handle that moves the smaller one out of the larger tube, thereby raising whatever heavy object is attached to the bracket. Well, when the ground collapsed, the smaller tube, which was resting on a wooden block, bent at about a 30 degree angle to the larger tube, thus rendering the jack useless, since it would not lower the trailer onto my truck. A combination of banging, cursing, battering the coupler of the trailer with the ball on my truck, and lots of sweat on my part meant that 45 minutes after I initially backed up to my trailer, it was finally attached to my truck. I had also rendered the jack even more useless in the process, and resigned myself to having the trailer attached to my truck until such time that a professional could remove it. Everything was thankfully packed, so the rest of the loading process went smoothly and I pulled out of the farm, with horse, great dane, and all the necessary accoutrements, at 7....

The Hunter Princess on a Budget

It has been a good long while since I have shown regularly, and to say that a lot has changed would be a vast understatement. My new horse, Chico, was a gift to me, since he is an older fellow with a prior injury who requires special attention. My showing is also going to be financed in a larger portion by my own self, so the house rules are about to change in here. Long gone are the days of the grooming stall, and the tack stall, and the other grooming stall, and the two stalls that were set up as a lounge and display of the barn's accomplishments. My new M.O. involves showing off the trailer whenever possible, dreaming of switching demos into a suburban so I can camp in the back, and spending early mornings on a braiding ladder.

I miss having more help, surely, but I am getting my setup perfected to the point where showing off the trailer is easier than having a stall and a grooming stall. I'll have to get some pictures for everyone. My two horse bumper pull has a side ramp also, which makes it really nice and airy in the summer, and plans are in the works currently for a quiet camping generator to further pimp my ride. It's a no-brainer to show at culpeper and deep run this way, since both are less than an hour from the barn. The shows at Rose Mount and Lexington are also within reasonable driving distance, although I will get a stall if my division is going more than one day, because being a tight wad hunter princess is, frankly, exhausting.

Some of my readers may wonder whether I should be allowed to maintain my title, given these changes in procedure and finances. I will have them know that my lovely horse will still always be wearing seasonally appropriate, custom made, monogrammed blankets from The Clothes Horse, and I will not be seen in the ring looking anything less than perfect. Well...if I can help it. I am a blonde, after all.