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And the winner is…

And the winner is…

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If you’ve been faithfully reading our blog you know which horse we’ve selected. Mikki mentioned it in her last post. In case you missed it, here’s a recap.

Ever since Sinbad left, we’ve been looking for a replacement horse. We needed one anyone could ride and this new horse would become my regular every day horse while I work with Moonshine. Over the course of the last month or so we’ve checked out a total of four candidates: 1) Snowball, a cremello Tennessee Walking Horse, 2) Misty, a spotted Tennesse Walking Horse, 3) Romeo, an Appaloosa and 4) Cash, a spotted Tennessee walking horse. Misty was eliminated early due to inexperience and Cash and Romeo quickly emerged as the front runners. After vet and farrier checks, short rides, long rides, pacing the floor and scratching our heads, we decided we’re ready to make a selection.

Cash…AND Romeo!

A while ago, Shari told us that if you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself collecting horses. This seems to be true and here we are with FOUR horses. Here’s why we selected both: Cash makes an excellent gaited horse pair for Valentine, plus he has the paint markings I prefer. He’s a handsome fellow, easy to ride and not as tall as Valentine. But Romeo has barrel racing experience, is also easy to ride and gentle (he’s also handsome). I can learn how to barrel race on Romeo and he’s reserved and gentle enough for the Kid, who we’ve decided will be taking lessons soon.

So now we have a few new challenges:

1) The expense of feeding four horses
2) We just bought a two horse trailer. Since Valentine is so big, we’d need a new truck to get a bigger trailer.
3) We only have 3 horse stalls. We need to convert a storage stall.
4) Introducing two new horses to the herd. Romeo apparently is the herd boss in his current pasture.

So meet our two new horses:

Cash Romeo

I’ll get some better pictures of them without riders.

Our horse world has just expanded! I think we have enough now, though. And on a side-note, our horse friend Shari just bought a big Tennessee Walking Horse that looks a lot of Valentine so it looks like we’ll be riding gaited a lot. More soon.

The hunt is on – candidate 4

The hunt is on – candidate 4

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We’ve had a busy horse-related weekend. We’ve been to two horse shows and checked out a fourth horse. Meet “Cash”, a 5-year-old spotted registered Tennessee Walking Horse. He’s about 15 HH, has a calm temperament, is trained and of course flashy. At one of the shows, we ran into some friends who were much more into horses than we thought. They were showing that night and during our conversation it was mentioned that they have this walker for sale. The guy bought this horse for his wife but she prefers black and white spotted coloring. She bought a black and white TWH three weeks after they bought Cash and although she loves them both, she’s only able to keep one. Mikki and I rode him a few times Sunday to get a feel for him and the ride went very well. Later Sunday we had an opportunity to ride him for a couple more hours on the theory that it’s much harder to hide bad behavior on a two-hour ride than it is on a 15-minute ride. We like him so much, we asked if we could keep him for a few days to see how he does at our barn.

The ride went well. We rode him through streams, wooded trails, hills, around cows, around other horses…nothing fazed him. Mikki rode Valentine (it’s so cool having a trailer!) and the two of them hit it off nicely. Although they did seem to want to race each other, we were able to hold them back. Once one went into the TWH gait, the other automatically shifted into that awesome gait, too. Cash trailered nicely, loading and unloading without concern.

So on the positive side, he’s met all of my qualifications. Shari even likes him. The only negative we can find is his feet. One front hoof is a little longer than the other and his feet are pretty rough. It’s probably because previous owners shod him themselves. We’re going to have our farrier out to check his feet. He could also use a little weight, which is something we could work on quite easily.

So at this point, we favor both Cash AND Romeo. I wish we could buy them both. We’ll see what we can do. I still plan to ask to take Romeo on a longer ride but we know his history and reputation so I’m less concerned with testing him out. I know he’s a good horse.

BTW, my shirt in this picture says “Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway,” a John Wayne quote. Thanks for the shirt, honey 🙂

The hunt is on – candidate 1
The hunt is on – candidate 2
The hunt is on – candidate 3
The hunt is on – candidate 4 (this post)