In like a lion?

Today was a "hit and run" visit. I was at the barn all of three hours :-( There was very light snow on the way down, and the forecast was for near blizzard conditions starting about 5PM... I wanted to be close to home by the time it started... not just starting the 2+ hour trip!

I was VERY teary on the drive down. I'm torn between two farms closer to home to move Daniel to. One is 11 miles from home! It is called Tory Hill Farm. Compared to the 105 miles now, only 11 is a DREAM! Beautiful rolling hills, an indoor, trails, only a dozen other horses on a 120 acre farm (for pastures, they figure 3 acres per horse), owner/trainer is a retired dressage judge, Jill Willcox, and she is just brilliant, but they will stall him at night in winter and it's a couple hundred more than I'm paying. Saving gas and cutting lessons will help bridge the gap, I'm sure.

The other place is 20 miles away, they will field board, but I wonder how he'll do turned out with 19 other horses.... I'm really agonizing over this decision! My family thinks I should go with the closer place - and ironically, it's where Dressage at Devon began. DAD is the first place I got up close to dressage and fell in love with it...

But, what happened today makes me feel less bad about leaving. Leeandra texted me that she had a stomach bug and wouldn't be teaching today. I texted back not to worry, I was heading down anyway. I went out to get Daniel and he was in the upper field. I brought him in, picked out his hooves and groomed him. Then I tacked him up and walked him to the indoor... what I saw was a jump course. I guess when people heard that Leeandra wasn't coming (she usually teaches in the indoor), they scrambled to set up a jump course. What do they say? When the cat's away, the mice will play? Hell, that's what happened!! To hell with asking anyone if they were planning to ride anything other than a 2'9" course... UGH! We basically just walked and trotted the very perimeter of the arena. I could tell Daniel was getting bored, so we hacked out to the outdoor.

Yep, jumps set up out there! Double UGH! We did a little walking and trotting in the outdoor, hacked back to the indoor and disappointed, dismounted. I took him back to the barn and untacked him, and started grooming him.

Apparently, someone at the barn was showing their horse to someone who was interested in buying him... she set up the course for them to ride. She must have thought, "Fuck everyone else", I guess. One other person wanted to lunge her horse, and she didn't even have enough room to do that...

The horse she's trying to sell took a bite out of Daniel's face last week, from what I've heard, so I'm not sorry to see him go. What pissed me off even more, was the buyers saw marks, and the seller bitched about the stallion he was out with and the dominant gelding who gets into it with him. I guess they didn't see me cleaning my saddle (even though at my size, I'm really hard to miss!), so I laughed and said, "I guess that dominant gelding would be my guy - he had a chunk out of his face from someone in the field." I'm sure their saint didn't freaking do it...

On the way home, I didn't feel so bad about planning to bring him closer to home. I'm leaning towards Tory Hill Farm. It's classical dressage... the two trips out there, I didn't even see a jump... Maybe that's the best place for us.