pony finals

My daughter and I had SUCH a good time at the USEF POny Finals today. She has been there since Monday, but I was only able to go up for the day today. The drive to Lexington is really pretty, thru Cumberland Gap, and it was a beautiful day for a horseshow.

Plus, the show was at Kentucky Horse Park, which is my fave horse show venue. If you like horses or have a child who likes horses, you should definitely visit the horse park. Its like Disneyland for equine lovers. There's miles and miles of riding trails, a cool horse museum, a barn full of famous retired horses you can meet, and usually some big equestrian competition or another going on.

Pony Finals are horse heaven. If you like horses, dogs, kids and horse shows, this was the place to be.

The top 300 hunter ponies in the country were there competing. To qualify, the pony has to have won a championship in a regular division (small, mediums or larges) at an "A" show in the previous 12 months. Or, if it's a green year pony, they can also qualify by winning the reserve at an A show. So these really are the creme de la creme of hunter ponies.

Plus, there is lots of horse trading going on. Since my daughter is the pony jock for her trainer, she got to try out several very nice smalls that her trainer was looking at for other children. Jane also got to ride the medium pony her trainer had for sale in the big national pony auction, which she enjoyed. The pony sold at a good price, which made Jane feel good.

Jane's pony, Cinco, did not break his green this year. Instead we kept him in a non-rated division this year to get him in better shape to start his green year in 2006. So he will start in the greens in December and Jane's big goal is to qualify to compete in Pony Finals in August of next year.

The classes were great to watch. I caught the entire medium disvision (90 ponies) and most of the smalls (80 ponies) in the over fences division. Jane's best friend Sydney's brother, Shawn, was 2nd out of 80 in the smalls in his jumping round and ended up 3rd overall in the entire country. His green small pony was 4th overall in that division. So the Casady family had a pretty amazing Pony Finals this year.

My favorite ponies were Hob Goblin, a medium who did moderately well, but who I really liked, and in the smalls, Cardiff Mardi Gras and Ingenue (who was 1st place). I also really liked Simply Magical, another medium. Actually, there were amazing horses in every direction.

We did have one mishap on the way home, when we drove into Oak Ridge at about midnight to take Jane's friend Margo home. SHe was sleepy and couldn't quite remember where she lived, so I kept slowing down and turning around all over the East side of Oak Ridge while we tried to find her street.

Suddenly, I was surrounded by FOUR Oak Ridge police cars and was informed I had been pulled over for drunk driving because I was driving so erratically. I explained to the half dozen police officers who had me cornered in a side street that I was not drunk, but lost, at which point they became very friendly and one of them had me follow him to the address we were looking for, only he got a little lost too.


It was sort of funny. Oak Ridge was totally dead at midnight on a Saturday and I guess all those police officers had nothing better to do than pull over sleepy, lost people and then get them more lost. But I think they meant well.