The three stages of boredom while watching dressage riding..... Bored, exceptionally bored, and kill me now.

I don't know where I would be without pics to click.

Sunset at the Hunter Jumper arenas.

I spent a lot of time today watching the various horse events and had to do a lot of walking to see everything. But It was a beautiful warm day for walking and watching horses.

They had the dressage events in the indoor arena, the stadium jumping and dressage practice, was held on the Hunter Jumper courses, and the barrel racing was at the rodeo grounds.

I watched the dressage just long enough to get a few pictures and some video clips, but it is so incredibly boring that I couldn't watch it for very long. The stadium jumping was okay, but it was so similar to what I've been watching with the Hunter jumpers for the last few weeks that it wasn't that interesting because I'd seen so much of it before.

 So I spent most of the time watching barrel racing. It''s infinitely more interesting, is more exciting even to someone that doesn't know a whole lot about horses, and the rules and concepts are easier to understand by non-experts such as myself, such as.

You go as fast as you can around three barrels, and the fastest person back to the starting line wins. On the other hand, dressage takes several judges, and after watching it being done, I still don't have the foggiest idea what you have to do to win or lose, other than the rider must sit on a slow-moving horse, ramrod straight  without moving any part of their body at all... Doesn't that sound fun to watch?

I still don't know what to do about leaving tomorrow. I'm not having any luck getting reservations at the places I want to go. And New Mexico state parks have gotten rid of a lot of their non-reservation sites and made some State Parks reservations only, which I had a feeling they were going to do because of political pressure from Reserve America wanting everything to be reserved because they're making a fortune on Internet reservations. But it will work out, I don't know WHERE I will be Monday night, but I will be SOMEWHERE.

Theboondork

Maybe someone should have given a little more thought as to how their riding breeches look from behind.

But if these were rodeo bull-riders, I would call those pants perfect camouflage.

I like seeing the little girl holding the horses lead rope. In fact I like seeing families doing anything together with their kids.

The stables behind the spectator stands at the rodeo arena.

The head judge at a dressage competition stays in a little building next to the arena where they can sleep comfortably while the event is going on. Having a cup of coffee handy shows experience and dedication to the job, but all the coffee at Starbucks won't keep you awake during a dressage competition.

It's fairly common for dressage riders to fall asleep during the competition. Which is why they wear helmets. It's a common occurrence for the inexperienced dressage competitors to doze off during their event and fall off their horse. The more experienced dressage competitors train there mounts to either wake them up, or stop and stand still so they won't fall off.

When the rider falls asleep during a dressage competition a well-trained dressage horse will normally stop and stand still until he sees the rider, or one of the judges wake up .