NJ 100+ 2026

 Long time readers know that I felt something special the first time I saw Booger running around her field as a two year-old. While our relationship certainly hasn't been all sunshine and rainbows, I saw potential in the half-feral filly from the start. Potential for what exactly was a little less clear. I never in a million years would have guessed 100 mile driving horse, but here we officially are.

Three weekends ago, Booger absolutely conquered the three-day hundred at NJ 100+ and came away looking like she hadn't done much of anything at all.

Photo by Mike, of course.

Driving at Carranza

 Last weekend, Mike and I took the horse/cart/motorcycle out again. This time, we headed down to Carranza so Mike could explore some new trail. I spent some time looking at All Trails and my tracks from the CTR last spring to map out a long-ish loop that would accommodate the cart. In the end, Booger and I did 19 miles, and everyone had a blast. 

I am 100% addicted to driving this mare. I worry it will become a problem because I love driving her so much more than riding her (although I like that too). It's all I want to do with her! Whee!

Buying this cart and harness over the winter was some of the best money I've ever spent.

Baby Horse Things

 I took a billion baby horse photos this month so I'm dumping them all in one place along with some basic updates on where Chip is these days. 

He turned six months old on the 10th. He has had his final set of vaccines. He is a pro about getting wormed. I am 100% head over heels in love with this colt.

This month was mostly about hand walking. I take him out a few days a week. I keep things simple. We walk around the ring or up and down the neighbor's driveway. I've started bringing him through the barn driveway and in/out all sides of the barn. We walk in all kinds of weather. We walk over poles and cavaletti and teeny tiny cross rails. We stop to look at anything that seems interesting or spooky (not much is spooky). Chip has quickly learned that touching things with his nose earns him treats, as does checking in with me. I keep our sessions short and positive and Chip seems to really enjoy them. 

We've also got the basics of ground work down. The concept of lateral bending really clicked this month! He yields his haunches easily. The shoulders are a little sticky, but he gets the concept. He backs up in hand and knows to stay out of my bubble (though we think this rule is stupid and would prefer to be a velcro baby). I can send him in a circle around me and ask him to change direction or come in to meet me. We are not doing any formal lunging, but there have been a handful of trot circles. He also does a great job doing my "untangle" exercise. I honestly need to drag Mike out to get video because these days are going by so fast. 

As you all read, we've also introduced ponying off of Lucy. Today, on my lunch break, we tried it for the second time. I was able to get on Lucy while holding Chip's lead rope. Then he followed her through the paddock and was a very good boy while I opened the gate (while mounted), rode through, and closed the gate. The gate used to scare him, so this is awesome! I rode Lucy for a mile-ish in the ring, mostly walking. Chip thought this was super fun. We practiced walking, halting, respecting Lucy's space while still checking in when called, changing directions, and circles. We even did a teeny, tiny bit of trot and canter. At the end of the ride, we rode down the driveway and back to the barn, where I was able to dismount and get both horses in the barn together. This was by far our longest session (23 whole minutes) and Chip's quarter never ran out. I'm over the moon with his progress.

As far as the rest of his handling goes, I have a little grooming routine down. We practice standing tied or cross tied in various spots (I need to add the outside cross ties to the mix now that it's lighter out after work). I groom him and have started handling his sheath for future cleanings. He lets me pick and rasp all four feet without fuss. I throw all sorts of things on him (towels, blankets, ropes) and do silly things like leaning over his back and patting him, swinging a rope over my head and his, and doing whacky dances all around him. I do a "fake girth" by making a loop with a cotton rope. I have rested a saddle on his back, which he doesn't care about, and which looked ridiculous. I even put a bit in his mouth twice (for about five seconds) which he thought was strange, but figured would definitely earn him a snack. We are a few years away from actually needing tack for anything, but it doesn't hurt to go through the motions.

I have also started leaving Lilly out with Chip every day. I put her out after I feed in the morning, and leave her out there until after night feed. I vary my feeding routine so the horses don't get attached to a fixed schedule so some days they're out together for 10 hours. Others they're only out for six or so. Lilly has continued to be very tolerant of a very pesky boy weanling. I could probably leave them out full time, but I've decided to hold off for a few reasons. 1. Lilly deserves to have a break and spend time in the pasture with the nice, quiet, adult horses. 2. I want Chip to remain independent. Lucy can be very herd bound and I'd like to avoid that. Booger can be too independent which I jokingly blame on the summer she spent in exile, but which probably does have to do with spending a lot of time being turned out alone. I like that Chip is used to having another horse come and go. He is getting socialized and learning to be a horse, but he is also learning that it's not a big deal to be turned out alone. 3. It's much easier to handle winter hay rations with the adults together over night. 4. I plan to geld him in the spring which means he'll need to be on solitary turn out while he heals. I don't want to get him used to having a buddy all the time only to take that away and add stress to a traumatic life event.

Wow. That was a lot more writing than I planned to do. The rest of this post will be photos and videos.

Taken after my NACMO ride. I didn't realize how much he'd grown until I compared to the last photo of us together.

One month earlier.

The Unicorn Costume

Things have gotten slightly ridiculous around here.

Mare Media

 September brought some cooler temperatures at last, and we did a fair amount of riding. With the storm at the beginning of the month came a lot of damage to the trails. I suspect Mike and I will be hiking out this fall to do trail maintenance ourselves. In the meantime, I feel like I'm relearning a lot of the trails. We also did more ring riding, which is becoming more and more enjoyable as the ring evolves. I have a few separate posts coming about stand-out rides from the month, but I'm going to drop a bunch of assorted photos here for safe keeping. As of this morning, Booger is up to ride/drive #109 for the year, and Lucy is up to #136. 

There are two small cross country style jumps on the vineyard trail. A year ago, I never would have guessed I'd be jumping either one of them. Now they feel easy! I love this little mare so much. She makes me feel braver than I really am.

August Riding Media

 This month has honestly sort of sucked for riding. Between the extreme heat, the flooding, and the gigantic biting bugs, I feel like I haven't been riding at all. Since our 15 miler, I've only worked Lucy and Booger seven times each. For Lucy, one of those rides consisted of me getting on her bareback in a rope halter. I got on her in the field, rode her to the ring, opened the gate, cantered one lap in each direction, rode down the driveway, and dismounted in the wash stall. It was too hot to do anything else. For Booger, one of those rides consisted of me riding her bareback up the driveway to the ring where we just did some ground work before hacking back home. I know fall is right around the corner, but I'm feeling rather deprived of saddle time.

Despite the lack of saddle time, the girls have been going well. Booger is up to ride #91 for the year and the difference in her training and her personality has honestly blown me away. Watching Cam jump her earlier this year really inspired me. Plus accidentally jumping those huge ditches on trail boosted my confidence and has allowed me to finally get out of Booger's way over fences. We're actually having a ton of fun jumping around! I'm  not a great jumper, but it's absolutely Booger's favorite thing ever. Her happy ears and tail in this photo make me so happy.

Drone Farm Tour

 How about something a little different? This week, I finally remembered to bring the drone to the barn.

The view across the street. The neat little rows are the grape vines. The vineyard stretches up and left on the screen. You can acually see the entire short vineyard loop that I blog about regularly. The red barns on the right are the boarding barn across the street (I never talk  about them).

Riding Media

 While I am still pretty much blogging about every single trail ride I do with Lucy, I won't be posting every last ring ride. That would be super boring, huh? I do have an increasing amount of riding photos and videos piling up though, so I'm going to dump them here. We're all pretty bored with winter riding already, and I try to find ways to mix it up on a regular basis. Here are a few things we've been up to...

Lucy seems to be enjoying her intro to jumping. We're going to spend some serious time on grids, poles, and gymnastics without raising the fences. We're going to start doing some oxers as soon as the weather permits. Still, it was fun to get some photos of our progress. Plus this way Lucy has to stand around while I set up the tripod, etc. while mounted.

The Lucy and Lilly show (feat. Booger)

Eryca gets credit for the title. We made a shared Google Photos album for our barn shenanigans, which she called the Lilly and Lucy show. 

 Business is slow right now. It's just the usual winter lull. I'm actually pretty ok with it. I get a little burned out every year, and 2020 was especially bad. I'm enjoying the dedicated clients I have every week, but I also appreciate some down time. As a result, I've been spending more time at the barn with "my" horses. 

I got invited to the PonyUP 100 Y2021 group on FB. The idea is simple: 100 rides in one year. It's a challenge meant for one horse and one rider, but the rules are pretty flexible and it's just a super wholesome group where everyone cheers everyone else on. I was eager to hop on the bandwagon. Plus I like to obsessively count everything anyway. My goal is to definitely get 100 miles on Lucy, but now that Booger has decided she wants to join the fun, I'm curious to see if I can do 100 miles on her too. 

So far this year I'm up to six rides on Lucy and four on Boo. 

For the most part, our rides are nothing exciting and I was going to just include them in my monthly recap. But by the time you factor Lilly in, it's an awful lot of media!!

So here are some photos, videos, and snippets from the last month or so.

I'll start with a photo of Booger since she's overdue for a formal appearance around here.

Deer and Turkey Playing

I forgot to tuck this into my monthly photo post. Mike and I have been spending some time each day "staring at nature" on our back deck. We have the list of usual suspects who make daily appearances at roughly the same time. The other night, however, we had an unusual pairing in the back pasture! There was a wild turkey in with the herd of deer, and one of the deer was feeling frisky and playing with the turkey! I wish they'd been in one of the closer paddocks so I could have gotten higher quality video, but I think this is worth a share anyway. It's not every day you see a turkey and a deer frolicking together.

March Photos

I think we can all agree that March was a very strange month. Even though I knew that lock down was coming long before it was announced, you can see the distinct change in photos on my phone; the moment when we went from taking safety measures to just plain staying home. I still have many posts that I'm going to ration out over the coming weeks, and I'll probably be doing snippets from our life here in the second most infected state in the world's most infected country. In the mean time, have a massive photo dump from March, when this crap began in earnest.

Probably our last trip into the Pine Barrens until winter.

Merrill Creek By Drone

I have just enough time for a quick filler post. I have a few longer posts in the making, but that requires sitting down for more than a minute and a half. Plus I have to prioritize. Sadly, things like taxes, lesson plans, and teaching clinics seem to come before blogging. Boo-hiss. 

Anyway. Two weekends ago, Mike and I were still not 100% after our flu (seriously, I don't think I've been that sick since I was a child). Still, we were both going a little stir crazy in the house. We decided to try to get out a little by driving up to Merrill Creek for a walk. We couldn't even call it a hike, honestly. Mike packed his camera and I packed the drone and we wandered off hoping to see some eagles or snow geese or... something. It was a pretty chilly, windy day, but the fresh air was a nice change. 

About a mile into our walk, Mike and I were both pretty wiped out. We hung out for a minute to see if we could spot the resident eagles. I'd seen one of them on a nearby back road after a lesson the previous week. It had flown very close to my car and landed in a corn field to my right, where it drank majestically from a puddle. Did I have my camera with me that day? No, of course not. 

Sadly, there was no sign of the eagles. It was pretty blustery so I imagine they were nested down somewhere under the cover of dense tree branches. We did see a ton of sea gulls and a handful of geese, but that's about it.

The good news is that I did send the drone up and got some pretty cool shots. With the gusting wind, I wasn't willing to fly around too much (or over the water very far), but the new perspective on one of our favorite places was fun to see. 

More proof that New Jersey is nothing but oil refineries and the turnpike. Stay away. It's hideous here.

Thankfully, both Mike and I are feeling back to our perky, adventurous selves now. We went on a real hike last weekend (more on that later). I'm back to work full time (and then some to make up for the lost income).  Hopefully the blog will pick back up as a direct result. The good (?) news about being sick is that it gave me time to actually catch up on my reading list and your blogs were the highlight of many days in a row for me.

February Photos

February apparently featured a ton of photos. I could probably make some mini entries about some of these, but I'm lazy. 

July Photos

Since I'm so sunburned that I had to cancel my morning ride and can barely walk...

One of my favorite local views.

June Photos

Monthly phone clearing below ;)

We got some more hiking in despite the increasing temperatures. This one was taken at Jenny Jump during a day of Geocaching.

Dolly's Tale

I'm pretty sure that the idea of keeping the blog up to date went right out the window the second I put Ozzy down. I am so far behind that I fear I will never catch up. I think you guys will be getting a lot of photo dumps without a lot of text until things level out again (if they ever do, which is not likely, honestly). However, I hate to leave loose ends on here, so I'm going to do a mega post about Dolly's stay with me back in March.

The short, spoiler version is as follows:
Dolly went home after 30 days, like we originally planned. I made a lot of progress with her over the course of the month, but in the end, her rearing issue was too much to warrant pumping in any more time, at least for now. The month consisted of us chiseling our way slowly forward in training, only to have to periodically cycle back to square one all over again. We found a routine that seemed to work for Dolly, and each time she'd progress a little further. Still, the rearing kept resurfacing, and if I went any slower, I'd be robbing her owner. Her owner is very happy with what we did accomplish, and the mare is not in any danger of losing her lucky home. Nobody got hurt, which is great. I was not expecting a miracle and I didn't get one. *sad trombone*

The long version features a lot of media and drama, and and and...

I did get attached to the little spotted mare.

Massive Catch Up Post

I have a growing sticky note of subjects that I need to blog about, but I'm going to get the cell phone photo dump out of the way first. That'll give you a general idea of what's been going on around here lately, and it will clear some space on my computer. With everything going on, I missed my March update so some of these are a little out dated.

The one constant in my life right now is the racehorses. I've been putting in more hours than I signed up for and I'm loving it. I need to do a separate post about how the horses are doing, with real photos from actual cameras. Mostly I'm just working on getting braver. Percy here is not helping. His issues have resolved and I'm back to riding him. His teeth really needed to be floated and that got addressed and fixed everything, but not before he reared straight up in the air with me on multiple occasions and rattled my confidence. Juli ended up riding him for me for a while and he kept her busy for sure. She's braver and more skilled than I am. They say you should do one thing every day that scares you. I have definitely found the way to do that! This photo was taken before the rearing started, when I really felt like we were making lots of progress! It's hard to remember that this horse is just a two year old and has been under saddle less than six months. The racehorses are definitely in an accelerated program, and it's an interesting exercise in perspective for me.

Racehorse Adventures

I mentioned in passing that the racehorses got about a month off after the holidays. They are now all back in work, and we've fallen into a rhythm. We currently have eight horses that are galloping daily, and with four of us riding, it works out really nicely. I have to do a separate post on my little gray friend, Harry, but the short version is that he's a Really Good Boy, and I've gotten a lot stronger, more balanced, and more confident from riding him for the last month or so. This is good because bringing  racehorses back into work can be somewhat, erm, interesting, at times.

One guess as to who this is!

Monthly Photo Post

It's that time!! (The only way I keep blogging.)

I have a bunch of new thoroughbreds on the roster. I like to stalk them after I meet them. This is Huey. He is being leased by a 14 year old girl who wants to do dressage and hunters with him. He's a big dude, and a fancy mover. I can't wait to see them progress together (and take photos of them along the way!)

Trailer Loading Tales: An Introduction

By popular demand (ok, Shauna said she wanted to hear this, and that's enough for me!) I present to you, Trailer Loading Horror Stories, a two part series. Part One: I'm Too Abusive. Part Two: I'm Not Abusive Enough. Part One takes place two years ago, which makes it pretty safe to re-tell, and also means enough time has passed that I can laugh at it.

In the spring of 2015, a woman approached me at a CTR to ask me about trailer loading a new horse she got.