Alternate title: “What ride season?”

To be fair, it’s better than some of the years I didn’t get to any rides at all…but even then, there were usually plenty of volunteer opportunities, crewing shenanigans, and overall good spirits to counter the “not according to plan” outcomes along the way.

The new AERC ride season starts Dec 1 (I still don’t know the rationale behind a season that runs Dec 1-Nov 30)…but the calendar year is still 2020, so my approach is a decidedly low bar of expectations, starting with “just getting to the ride,” since the latter half of the season, my plans to get Liberty to a ride got derailed on multiple occasions.

The season started well, with a super-fun LD on Atti at Dashing Through the Trails. And then the wheels promptly fell off the bus at the Tonto Twist 50 where we were pulled for lameness at the finish with what turned out to be the culmination of an ongoing, off-and-on suspensory issue. And thus my spring ride plans went the way of the dodo.

The pups and I volunteered at the Wickenburg ride at the end of the month, doing everything from timing to P&Ring to vet scribing. The AERC Convention managed to happen right on the cusp of the entire world collectively imploding, and then from that point on, the wheels fell off the 2020 bus entirely and there was no more ride season to be had until late fall, when things have slowly, albeit restrictively, started to happen again.

Bringing Liberty home over the summer was a definite highlight of the year, and even though she tosses some challenges my way here and there, bringing her up to condition and working on her training has given me a lot more purpose and motivation in my riding, and having the aspects of “still needs some training” gives me something to focus on and work on even when the competition goals may be a nebulous and ever-moving goalpost, depending on what is actually able to happen or not.

With Mimi, there’s not a lot of training to be done anymore. She knows her job, and really prefers for me to not micromanage her, thankyouverymuch. So arena work isn’t her idea of fun, at all, anymore. Trails or bust.

But I don’t always have time to hitch up and haul out to trails (and the state land by the barn I used to be able to ride just sold off to a homebuilder, so goodbye riding space and hello even more traffic and an endless sea of tile roofs), so sometimes arena riding has to be a thing still, and fortunately, Liberty is in a phase where she benefits from arena work just as much as trail conditioning.

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All that said, today is officially the start of a new ride season, and I’m doing a lot of breath holding and finger crossing that it ends up being fun, productive, and above all, sane and normal. Here’s hoping, at least.