Forest excursion

Me, Ellie and Sarah took the ponies to the forest today, was a lovely day and it's our first excursion out to the forest in a wee while. Choc's first one altogether, although he has been to the beach before and was pretty good there.

Loaded them all up and headed off about half two. The forest is only 20 mins away and is such a fantastic facility - there are heaps of tracks all well marked and it's really well maintained.

Choc was good and seemed pretty relaxed and about a third of the way through the ride we decided to stop and take some pics. The first pic is me and Choc on the left and Ellie and Spyke on the right.

And then there's Ellie and Spyke with Sarah and Bert - they are both completely wild ponies as you can see....

So things were all good until then, when we started off again and Choc decided he'd done enough (all of 20 mins walking). Little bugger started doing his specialty buck/rear manouevre which seemed to be getting progressively worse. So I hopped off and lead him for a bit, thinking I'd hop on again a bit further along the track. Then I made the mistake of trying to make him walk through a big puddle. He pulled away from me and then trotted off into the distance - in the opposite direction to where we were going...

Once he realised no-one was following him he turned back and followed us, but was a complete twit hooning around and wearing himself out. Bert and Spyke were great though and didn't go silly when Choc came belting up behind them. Ellie managed to grab Choc's reins after a bit and after some stern words (swearing) from me I hopped back on. He of course was puffing as he's still unfit, but the bad news for him was there was still the rest of the ride to go including a nice big long hill at the end. That should teach him to waste all his beans on being a twit early on. He did redeem himself slightly by doing some lovely collected trot work though...

The grass is definitely growing so perhaps that's his excuse. The cows are loving it and heifer 30 is looking ok too. Have her on some hard feed to help out with her milk production, but she looks ok and baby is full of beans and bouncing around heaps now, very cute! The piggies are growing too, although seem to be growing longer more than anything?!