Too Much Mud. It's been beautiful and sunny all week. The only day rain was predicted was today. The last Pinto show of the year was today, rain or shine and it was not looking good. I drove the 40 minutes to the show, through clear skies, light sprinkles, and the closer I got to the show, more and more rain. All of us were hoping it would just be a light rain that we could wait out. But there we were, at 6:45 am, in the dark, with rain pouring down. The parking area is muddy, clay soil. We were afraid to get stuck in the mud so we moved the truck and trailer out. It was slippin and sliding but it got out okay. The grounds were a mess, except for the arenas. Bandit doesn't do well in muddy footing as I found out at the Apple Valley show two years ago. That's where he first went lame, after I showed him in an arena that had some really muddy sections. I didn't really want to stay and show, even though I thought we would do well (I usually think that until we actually show :). There were plenty of reasons not to stay:
1. It was too risky to Bandit, given our experience in Apple Valley
2. If we stayed and showed, the classes would probably be small and there wouldn't be very many Pinto or PAC points
3. We aren't in the running for any year end awards
4. We planned to go to a small, open show in two weeks
We decided to leave rather than wait it out. Of course the rain did clear up a couple of hours later, but that's okay. The grounds were so wet that we didn't think they would dry out soon enough to avoid a muddy mess.
Here are the muddy tracks the horse trailer left:
Bandit did really well in practice yesterday and last weekend. He's such a good boy!
